Yes.

ok I gotta ask 🤣 why?
I assume just to see if it works? 😁

What I want to know is why it's easier to install a CD-ROM drive in an XT than a high density floppy drive.

Because a CD-ROM is not managed by the BIOS. 😉

Anonymous Coward wrote:

What I want to know is why it's easier to install a CD-ROM drive in an XT than a high density floppy drive.

Easier?
FDC cards with BIOS weren't that rare, and safe bet an FDD+FDC combo was still cheaper than a CD-ROM drive+controller.

Maybe it was a regional thing, but back in the 90s when I had an XT, I searched everywhere for one of those mythical high density floppy controllers and never found one. Even to this day, I still don't own one. Granted, these days it's not a big problem to get them as they are being reproduced. The XT-IDE BIOS supports them, correct? Unfortunately, it's too little too late, as 1.44mb drives are now just as obsolete as the 360k ones.

Not sure about 1.44MB FDDs being obsolete as you say. There is some old software that installation is required from a floppy drive.

I've acquired a fair number of 1.44MB floppy drives. Quite a few of them were not working properly when I got them.

The easiest fix I have found for both 5.25" and 3.5" FDDs is to clean all the dirt/dried grease off of the drive slides and put new grease on there. That right there fixed about 80% of the drives I had that weren't working properly.

The others I just mark bad and save for a while for parts if cleaning the heads doesn't help.

Maybe I just need to bite the bullet and buy multiple Gotek style drives and be done with the old floppy drives for the most part other than having a system to image floppy disks.

High density floppy drives are easy to use on an XT class system. Just grab any old generic multi i/o dard with HD floppy support. Winbonds are excellent. Place card in a slot were the ide portion over hangs. Boot to the hard drive and run a small TSR called 2M. WAMMO! 1.44meg and 1.2meg access. All documented here https://sites.google.com/site/misterzeropage/ to quote:

High Density Floppy Controller

1.44meg drives are probably one of the most frequently requested upgrades to XTs. However, in this modern age 1.44meg drives are quite obsolete, so this upgrade is now much less necessary than before. But of course that didn't stop me from doing it anyway! I still happen to use 1.44meg disks on a regular basis, and it can be quite convenient when you're stuck in a shitty situation. I had actually been trying to get a 1.44meg drive into my XT for many years, but I was never able to procure one of those magic "high density floppy controllers" that everybody talks about. Sometimes you can find them on eBay for a pretty penny, but it's really not worth it. An HD floppy controller with its own BIOS is probably your best choice if you want to be able to boot off a 1.44meg or 1.2 meg disk, but if all you need to do is to be able to read and write these disks, there is another option available. A long time ago some very smart person wrote a great little program called "2M". This software was mostly used for stuffing up to 2MB of data onto a standard 1.44MB disk, hence the name "2M". However there are a few other interesting features that come with this software package, notably the little known (and seldom used) BIOS extensions for AT and XT systems that allow you to run high density drives without the need for special card with a dedicated BIOS. There is only one requirement: you must use a floppy controller that supports the faster spindle speeds of high density drives...99% of XTs do not meet this requirement. Thankfully these cards are a dime a dozen, and can be frequently pulled from 386 and 486 class machines. You will find that many 16-bit IDE multi I/O" cards of 386/486 systems will work just fine (minus IDE functionality) in an 8-bit XT slot. In this way you can have serial, parallel and floppy (and sometimes a game port) all on a single card. Many XTs require THREE separate cards to supply all these features! And of course you also get the benefit of having a 1.44mb or 1.2mb floppy drive in your XT by loading a small 3.9kb TSR. One of the advantages of using a TSR rather than having the physical floppy BIOS is that the TSR can be loaded and unloaded as needed. An HD floppy controller with a dedicated BIOS will occupy a small chunk of your UMB memory, which can be annoying if you run a UMB manager like QRAM to make that space available for drivers. QRAM allocates UMBs in 16kb blocks, so you risk losing a precious 16kb of memory. If anyone is interested in running a 1.44meg drive in their XT using 2M, I highly recommend a generic floppy controller running the Winbond chipset as shown.High Density Floppy Controller.

The file with the driver

From the 2M creator:

"The distribution archive also contains small drivers that add 1.44 and 1.2 MB drive capability to XTs and earlier ATs. For hardware support the author has you mount a 16-bit multi-function card – yes, even in an 8-bit slot (which also provides functional com and lpt ports). Using this technique I successfully added a 1.44 drive to an XT clone – though in this case the driver supported only one floppy, not the two it was supposed to. However, the standard 5¼ drive was still bootable (of course)."

The other option is a dedicated 8-bit high density floppy drivecontroller card with its own bios like this one.

I have two. One in the Redstone XT Turbo and a spare.

You can buy new HD floppy drive cards from here: https://monotech.fwscart.com/DeluxeFloppy_-_8 … 4_19478745.aspx which looks like.

I hope this information is of help tp some one and may be this post should be pin somewhere.

i simply use Sergey Kieslevs FLoppy BIOS on my XTIDE Card, but it has some disadvantage, with it DD does no longer work.
Now i have HDD 1,44Mb and 1,2Mb Support.

And for DD i need to load 2M 2M-XBIOS.EXE Driver.

Yeah i tried CD-Rom Drives earlier and got nothing to work..
So have you sucesfull tested this ?
i don`t remember it right but some thing contains 286 instructions.. the IDE CD-ROM Driver or MSCDEX i will give it a shot.
As Sony CDU is different maybe i have look and the driver works at least with 80186 instructions (V20)

I haven't tested the Sony interface specifically, but I have tested SCSI and Panasonic. I remember with the Panasonic driver, there were multiple versions and not all of them worked. Anyway, it's always possible to drop in a V20 if the driver contains 80186 instructions.

What drivers work, and does even MSCDEX work with a 8088 cpu? I know that NEC V20 makes thing a lot easier.

Of course MSCDEX works on an XT. The very first CD-ROM drive, the Philips CM-100 from 1985 used MSCDEX 1.0 and worked fine with an XT. Later versions added features for higher CPUs but still run on a 8088.

The driver itself may require a 286, the Sony CDU is a drive from 1993 after all.