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.