I just installed a second floppy disk drive into this computer. How do I get it to recognize and access it? I tried the New Hardware option in the control panel but no deal. Thanks for any help.
-M
Depending on your OS, you probably have to alert the computer in the BIOS that you have the second floppy. Assuming of course you’ve installed it properly.
When you turn on the computer, see if it says something like “hit F10 for setup”. If it doesn’t tell you what you should hit to get to the BIOS setup, here are some common things you can hit to try to get into the BIOS:
- delete
- F10
- Heck, try any F key.
- ctrl-alt-esc
Ahhh…
I’ll do that. Thanks.
-M
Holy 1986, Batman!
OK, I’ll bite: why in the world do you want a second floppy drive in a computer? The last computer I used with dual floppy drives had the operating system and a dozen programs on one floppy and used the second to hold your documents. That was back in the era when mere mortals did not own computers that had hard drives.
Is one, perhaps, a 5.25" drive and the other a 3.5"?
You also need to make sure that the ribbon cable is installed properly. Most of the floppy drive cables have two pairs of connectors, each pair consisting of a large (for 5.25" drives) and a small (for 3.5" drives) connector. Usually the pair at the far end from the motherboard is for the “A” drive. This pair will have a section of wires in the middle of the ribbon separated and twisted around. The other pair (usually in the middle of the cable) is for the “B” drive.
also one floppy has to have the jumper set to slave, one to master.
Sure would be easier if I knew what kind of computer this is…
Floppy drives don’t have jumpers, only hard drives. That’s why the ribbon cable is twisted on one set of connectors, to differentiate between “A” and “B” drives.
Early 3.5" drives did have a “0/1” switch so set whether it was the A or B drive. My first 3.5" drive has such a switch. But the twisted cable/no switch standard soon took over.
" Floppy drives don’t have jumpers, only hard drives."
Some do, some don’t, early ones did not, newer ones do, I got some in the closet, I can show ya, if I didn’t throw them out yet.
All the images in our archive are stored on 3.5’’ disks. We haven’t made the jump yet to transfer the entire thing on to ZIP disks. So there is a lot of disk swapping as you can imagine just to pull up some images. It is a refurbished Acer with Win98.
-M
Handy is correct, except drive-select jumpered floppies are rare and were used in older systems that used a 34-pin drive cable with no twist. A nd B were set with jumpers instead. A would be jumpered as DS0, and B would be jumpered as DS1. Any jumpers appearing on modern drives are not used for this purpose, but are used to set other features, such as 2.88MB disk support (which never did take off).
Most XT computers I’ve taken apart had straight cables. All of the disk drives back then came with jumpers, and a lot more jumpers than just DS0/DS1. When 3.5" disks became popular they too started out with jumpers, but by then the drive cable with the twist was the standard floppy interface cable. Sometime around the era of the 386 PC, manufacturers started omitting the jumper from the drive.
Floppy disks are only good for about 7 to 10 years. You might want to work on getting that stuff transferred over to something more permanant rather soon.