Floppy Drive Advice

[Chuck Guzis]

On 27 Sep 2010 at 21:01, Tony Duell wrote:

> I think the problem is that many modern motherboards don't have the
> pins of the second drive select and MotorOn signal wired up. Whether
> the signals exist on accessible pins of an I/O chip I don't know (if
> they do, it may be possible to add jumper wires, but some people are
> afraid of soldering to motherboards).

In most modern motherboards,the FDC is tucked into a corner of the 
Southbridge chip (or on the combo south/north chip) and the signals 
for only one floppy are materialized.  I've seen this on a lot of not-
so-modern Pentium 3 booards, so it's not a new trend.

What was the Intel(?) chipset that could be configured to support an 
additional floppy on the parallel port?  I recall being a little 
surprised to see that, but now I don't recall the specifics.

There's also at least one chipset that allows for an additional drive 
by decoding the motor and drive-select lines (probably something like 
"selected, but motor off), but I don't recall the details either.  

--Chuck