Hi, I don't know the answer to your question, but may I ask why you need to change the default order ?
- If it's only about booting, there's a utility called boot_b.
It will create a bootable diskette for your a: drive that redirects to drive b:. Worked on my XT clone, too. 😀

If you connected the unit to the "drive b" connector (the one on the opposite side of the twisted section) wouldn't that effectively swap them?

Yeah floppy drives on pc are cable selected in most cases. Before twist : B, after twist : A

By the way, some bioses bring a "swap drive A and B" setting so you don't need to touch anything

Im going to try a before twist like you guys said above I didnt know about this I need to swap them so I can boot some bootable programs as I only have them on 3 1/2 disks and the DDO software I am using only has the option to boot from the A: before the OS is says to press the space bar to boot from floppy there is no choice as to which drive you want and in my case A: is always 5 1/4, the boot_b program looks good if I cant get a cable with a before twist I will give it a go so thanks Jo22 for that. It would be good if my Bios had the swap floppy drive option.

Thanks all, before the twist has fixed it.

I have yet to find a BIOS floppy swap option that actually worked right. I've tried it a few times now and just ended up changing the cable instead every time.

Glad you found your way. To those finding this thread later on, there have been jumpers to swap the drives on every combo floppy model I have personally used (Epson and Teac.) You just have to Google the model you have and find out what the settings are. Obviously, using the connector on the other side of the twist is an effective solution as well -- that's all the jumpers do.

SirNickity wrote:

I have yet to find a BIOS floppy swap option that actually worked right. I've tried it a few times now and just ended up changing the cable instead every time.

Back then in the DOS era I just used a mechanical switch that swapped the two signal lines as needed, conveniently mounted in an unused 5.25" HH front plate.
So there was no need to open the PC.
Just a matter of flipping the switch and a short invocation of the BIOS setup.

I'm curious if anyone has had any luck with that option. When I've tried to use it, it was mostly to get around a single-connector cable that didn't have a twist in it. That is, I only had one drive connected, so I was swapping B: to A:, and <null> to B:. I haven't taken good notes of the outcomes, but it's something like a floppy fail message on POST, or DOS doesn't see the drive, or it asks to insert a disk and press Enter. I tried it on a P4 with XP and it just confused the OS on what was actually installed. I'm sure XP uses direct hardware access rather than BIOS calls, so that would be kinda expected.