I've owned three motherboards that allowed two floppy drives to be configured, but only recognize drive A.

normal.

At the end of the P3 era they really started chopping legacy features. You are basically SOL with that board, unless by some miracle they made a different bios that allowed 2 floppy support.

Can you boot Linux on the machine? It will talk to the hardware directly, bypassing the BIOS, so it will tell you whether the hardware supports two drives or not. I've often wondered on these boards whether they cut BIOS support to save space in the flash chip, or whether they produced new silicon that dropped the I/O lines specific to the second drive to reduce the pin count on the Super IO chip.

Would also be interesting to see if the onboard floppy controller could be disabled, with an add-in card installed instead, and whether the BIOS picks up two drives on that. Did they ever make PCI cards (SCSI or IDE) with floppy controllers on them?

luckybob wrote:

normal.

At the end of the P3 era they really started chopping legacy features. You are basically SOL with that board, unless by some miracle they made a different bios that allowed 2 floppy support.

That's what I was afraid of.

The " a different bios that allowed 2 floppy support" has my attention. I've read about other intel boards from this era being flashed with different BIOS to gain Tualatin support. Perhaps I could find one that would support both floppy drives. I'll see if I can find information on the integrated controller which will be a good indicator.

Malvineous wrote:

Can you boot Linux on the machine? It will talk to the hardware directly, bypassing the BIOS, so it will tell you whether the hardware supports two drives or not. I've often wondered on these boards whether they cut BIOS support to save space in the flash chip, or whether they produced new silicon that dropped the I/O lines specific to the second drive to reduce the pin count on the Super IO chip.

Would also be interesting to see if the onboard floppy controller could be disabled, with an add-in card installed instead, and whether the BIOS picks up two drives on that. Did they ever make PCI cards (SCSI or IDE) with floppy controllers on them?

I could probably get an early version of ubuntu running on it without much trouble. There are no proper PCI, PCIe, USB, or any other modern interfaces that you can get a floppy controller for. That's the point of the Catweasel, but even that isn't a "real" floppy controller as far as I know.

Sorry for the off topic, but you are the akbkuku that made some videos with druaga1? That post videos with hex numbers prefix?
if you need older versions i may have some really old ubuntu cd that i can create an image and upload for you( i think that in this case it isn't illegal and not break the rules of the forum)

Probably easier to boot an old Linux and see if you get two floppies, to save you hunting down an old BIOS if the hardware doesn't support it. Even a modern 32-bit distro should support P3 machines.

The main idea behind the Catweasel (and the more modern Kryoflux) was to read non-PC formats like Amiga floppies on modern machines, that's why they aren't "normal" floppy controllers. Although I haven't thought about it much before, now that I have, I'm a bit surprised that seemingly every IDE and SCSI controller on an ISA card had a floppy controller, yet none of the PCI ones do.

.legaCy wrote:

Sorry for the off topic, but you are the akbkuku that made some videos with druaga1? That post videos with hex numbers prefix?

That is me.

.legaCy wrote:

if you need older versions i may have some really old ubuntu cd that i can create an image and upload for you( i think that in this case it isn't illegal and not break the rules of the forum)

Malvineous wrote:

Probably easier to boot an old Linux and see if you get two floppies, to save you hunting down an old BIOS if the hardware doesn't support it. Even a modern 32-bit distro should support P3 machines.

Ubuntu hosts all their prior versions so it is pretty easy to get them: http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/

Malvineous wrote:

The main idea behind the Catweasel (and the more modern Kryoflux) was to read non-PC formats like Amiga floppies on modern machines, that's why they aren't "normal" floppy controllers. Although I haven't thought about it much before, now that I have, I'm a bit surprised that seemingly every IDE and SCSI controller on an ISA card had a floppy controller, yet none of the PCI ones do.

I was aware that they are meant for the more obtuse formats(I'd like one someday for my HP Series 80 computer). It is surprising, I've gone on a couple ebay/google rabbit hole searches trying to find anything that was a PCI floppy controller. But I haven't found any solutions yet. I'd really like to be able to have 3.5", 1.2MB 5.25", & 360KB 5.25" drives in one computer to work as a disk maker for all my older systems.