Hey gents,
Been trying to conjure up a workaround for my Intel SE-440BX build. It won't accept two diskette drives on the same cable (unless there's a workaround nobody has told me about), so I'm looking at buying an ISA floppy controller. Will there be any issues with that? Adding an ISA card with an extra floppy connector so that I can get both a 5.25" and 3.5" floppy active at the same time?
That's odd. Is there such a thing as a floppy controller only accepting one advice?
Can you try a different cable?
(Decommissioned:)
The one floppy drive issue is due to the I/O controller Intel used in its BX motherboards. It is really stupid from our perspective, but in the late 90s, only 3.5" disks were being used.
You should be able to use an ISA floppy controller if you disable the built in floppy controller through the BIOS.
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So even if the floppy controller has only one floppy channel, it will work with both drives because it's not as dumb as the BX board? 😀
My old cases are hard to take apart repeatedly.
On Super Socket 7 boards I found that some boards can use two, whereas others can only use one. Didn't know about the BX440 limitation, that's quite interesting. I've only tested with two of the GOTEK floppy emulators however. I also found that there is a lack of "nice / new" floppy ribbon cables that take two drives.
It's not the 440BX limitation. I used dual floppy drive with ASUS P2B and P3B-F mainboards without any troubles. It seems to be Intel manufactured boards limitation.
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moved to marvin
Water flows down the stream
How to ask questions the smart way!
wrote:It's not the 440BX limitation. I used dual floppy drive with ASUS P2B and P3B-F mainboards without any troubles. It seems to be Intel manufactured boards limitation.
Dito. Works on my P2B-S.
I always thought it was a BIOS limitation (mainly because Intel boards have it, while others with the same chipset don't.) That being said, could a modified BIOS fix the issue? Or could it be the floppy controller chip isn't standard? I never really looked into it. I loved the Intel SE-440BX-2 board I got except for that. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy with the board I ended up with, and I've been a big fan of Gigabyte devices for years. But, if I could fix my Intel board, I'd feed more comfortable when the time comes to sell it.
Feeding Dragon
If the floppy controller is on the chip, and the chip supports it, could it be that Intel left the drive select and motor enable pins for the second floppy disconnected?
Southbridge (82371EB chip in SE440BX motherboard) has nothing to do with supporting single or dual floppy drive. It's Super I/O chip task to handle them.
another work around I found with single drive boards is using a LS-120 drive. they run off the IDE controller and can act as a faster 3 1/2 drive.
