On 4/8/2013 9:57 AM, m.roth@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> OH! I thought, since the m/b is from '05 or '06, that it would detect the
> floppy drives, but*that* I need to look at. Thanks!
the floppy interface was really low level. all parallel signals, like
select drive, step, direction, head select, serial data, clock, write
enable, and a status line for home, and index (the hole in the disk that
said its at sector 0).
the ONLY way to detect a drive is connected was to STEP outwards 100
times, checking for the 'home' status each time, this takes several
seconds per drive. AFAIK, there was no way electrically to tell the
difference between drive types, unless there's a reliable disk in the
drive. so the BIOS's pretty much stopped doing the
auto-home-and-detect thing early on when floppies became optional
because it was /so/ slow and added significant time to POST. and even
from the very beginning, you have to configure the BIOS for the drive
types (heck, early hard disks had to be configured in the BIOS too)
--
john r pierce 37N 122W
somewhere on the middle of the left coast
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