Actually floppy controllers are still part of the super i/o chipset in modern systems, my quad-core AMD has a floppy controller on the board and it was built last year. I haven't been motivated to put the floppy drive in here though, I have 7 of the USB variety. Regards, Kerry. On 11/04/2012 9:33 PM, Martin McCormick wrote: > The system I have that started the discussion of the > boot sequence has no floppy drive at all. It's possible there is > a traditional floppy controller and connector hidden somewhere > on the board, but it was manufactured around 2004 or so and > floppies were starting to fall out of favor by then. I can't > imagine why they left out such a vital resource as one could > have used it and around seventy-thousand floppy disks to back up > the 70-gig hard drive in, let's see, about 48 days. > > The BIOS setup screen actually lists a Drive A but you'd > have to probably find an IDE floppy drive to make it work. > > Fortunately, the boot sequence did not change on this > system. I was just confused by the way the power-off sleep > feature worked. > > As of last night, I was able to use the wheezy rescue > disk to mount the hard drive so I could go in and edit the file > names in /etc/rc2.d. Those are all the scripts that start > important unix services such as cron and many others. > There is a README file that tells you how to prevent a service > from starting so I turned off bluetooth as there is no bluetooth > controller, gdm3 as there is not a mouse present and I think > maybe one more service. > > The system rebooted and speakup came right up each time. > I now have a good command-line system with an accessible login > prompt. > > It seems like I read that somebody got gnome to run with > speakup, though. The goal is to be able to use it all. I would > really like to get firefox working in gnome. Lots of other > things are less hassle under the command line. > > Glenn writes: >> I have never run into this as the boot setup by default. >> Often the CD drive is third, and I change that to second, but I don't know >> why a manufacturer would ship a computer with the floppy drive not the >> first >> boot device, unless a customer asks for that configuration. >> Glenn > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
