Dual floppy support

[DOSGuy]

I'm an old DOS guy and I even have my own DOS games website (www.classicdosgames.com), so I still use 5.25" floppies on a regular basis. I have always had both 3.5" and 5.25" floppies in all of my computers, which was never a problem until I got burned on my last motherboard purchase, an ASUS K7V880, which only supports one floppy drive. This wasn't a problem on my MSI KT3 Ultra, but ASUS tells me that modern motherboards usually don't support two floppies any more. I want to buy a top of the line gaming motherboard, but the ASUS A8N-SLI only supports one floppy. Are there any high end motherboards left that support two floppies?

 

[Budman]

Come join the rest of the world in the future where a floppy is a long lost past thing that nobody uses anymore.

We now have a thing called bootable optical drives.

 

[DOSGuy]

Yeah, my Plextor 716SA can do that. Unfortunately, it refuses to play Commander Keen floppy disks. What's up with that?

 

[Hacp]

Maybe you should try one of those USB floppies.

 

[DOSGuy]

Yeah, that's a thought. They may eventually stop putting a floppy drive connector on motherboards at all, and there isn't going to be a 5.25" USB floppy drive. PCI should stick around for a while, though. Do they make FDC PCI cards?

 

[Harvey]

Are you sure the FD controller doesn't support two FD's? Does is only list one in the CMOS?

Just curious.

I'm an old DOS guy, too. I've stayed with Win 98 SE for a long time, but I just learned how to do most of the strange DOS tricks I need for some of my essential legacy programs in XP so I'll be installing XP Pro pretty soon.

 

[DOSGuy]

The BIOS only has one entry for "Legacy floppy drive A:", and I can't get Windows to detect the second floppy. ASUS replied to me that their current motherboards only support one floppy drive. I don't understand why. If a motherboard has a floppy connector, why wouldn't the BIOS support two floppy drives? Once they've devoted themselves to the expense of a 34 pin connector and given up motherboard real estate to provide it, what would be the additional cost of supporting both floppy drives instead of one? I could understand 0 floppy drives, but why 1 instead of 2?

 

[11427]

Two that I know ('cause I have 'em) are the MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum and the DFI LP UT NF4 SLI-DR. I have a 5.25 and a 3.5 in my MSI Neo2 rig. The DFI shows support for two in the bios but I have not tried that one.

 

[DOSGuy]

Awesome, that's a good board. It's nice to know that DFI still cares.

 

[Peter]

Well first of all the FDC controller chip they use must still have the control lines for the 2nd drive. Some don't.

Your way out: Connect the 5.25" drive there, and use an IDE SuperFloppy drive or a USB FDD for 3.5".

 

[DOSGuy]

The MSI K8N-Neo4 supports only 1 floppy, so the DFI LanParty may be the last of a dying breed. That's too bad since my last MSI board still supported two floppies. I did, however, find one PCI floppy disk controller. It's expensive, but it's designed to read almost every disk format ever. The CatWeasel MK4 will accept virtually any floppy drive, including old Mac, Amiga and Commodore drives, and sells for about 99 euros. If they ever stop stop having floppy drive connectors on motherboards, this sort of thing may be the only way to have a 5.25" drive.

 

[RobbyG]

I believe that the Abit AN8 Series supports 2 floppy drives also (according to the manual). I had looked into this as well when I was building my new rig and found that the boards that use the Winbond W83627THF I/O chipset (like my Epox) only support one floppy, you will want to look for boards with the Winbond W83627HF chipset (note the missing "T" at the end).

 

[keeleysam]

I have a 5.25 and 3.5 on my MSI neo2

 

[DOSGuy]

I just downloaded the PDF versions of the manuals for the A8N-E, SLI, SLI Deluxe and SLI Premium and all of them showed only "Legacy Diskette A:" in the BIOS and didn't mention dual floppy support anywhere that I could see. That's exactly how it is with my K7V880, and an ASUS support tech informed me that they don't do dual floppy support any more. I decided to believe him and take my business elsewhere. Did you end up buying an A8N or did you go with Epox? If you have two floppies in an A8N, how did you do it?

All MSI K8N-Neo4's report that "1 floppy port supports 1 FDD". The Epox 9NPA+ SLI lists only "Drive A" in the BIOS. The DFI LanParty series shows a BIOS screenshot that lists "Drive A" and "Drive B". The DFI boards are the only SLI boards I've found so far that definitely have dual floppy support.

Speaking of support for legacy products, the LanParty unfortunately doesn't have a parallel port on the rear panel, which my Brother HL-1230 laser printer connects with. Yes, you can add serial or parallel ports to any motherboard with either external connectors from the motherboard or PCI cards from companies like Lava, but it's still worth thinking about these things for convenience's sake. For the record, the DFI and Epox boards don't have parallel or serial on the rear panel, the ASUS A8N boards have parallel only, and the MSI K8N-Neo4 boards have both parallel and serial. None of the boards had both dual floppy support and a parallel port on the rear panel. On the other hand, the reference boards from ULi have parallel and 2 serials on the rear panel and, based on the the ability to run PCI/AGP/PCI-E SLI graphics, may care enough about backwards compatibility to support dual floppy. Maybe I'll wait for one of those things to come out.

 

[RobbyG]

I'm referring to the Abit AN8 Series, not the Asus boards. The manual I downloaded for the AN8 Series shows settings for Floppy A and B in the "Standard CMOS Features" which is on page 3-10 of the manual. I didn't end up buying the board so I can't say for sure if it is correct or not, maybe someone with one of these boards can verify.

I have the Epox Ultra board and it only supports 1 floppy. I looked at the SLI version and you can buy a parallel/serial port bracket from Epox that will work with the board since it has a header for both, they removed it from the rear ports in favor of the exhaust fan.

 

[DOSGuy]

Oh, AN8! Sorry, I forgot about Abit. The Fatal1ty AN8-SLI and AN8-SLI do support dual floppy drives, though neither comes with parallel or serial ports, so make sure you have a USB printer or add a PCI card.

Unfortunately, after hearing about the SLI X16, I really can't see myself buying anything until it comes out. SLI without a paddle, and since it will soon be possible to connect cheaper cards in SLI mode through the PCI-Express bus with the option of upgrading to cards that will really use 16 lanes each in the future, I definitely want one of those. I hope that DFI and Abit will continue to support dual floppies in their next round of products, and maybe someone can figure out why ASUS, Epox and MSI haven't retained the option.

Thanks to everyone who helped me in my research on this.

 

[Peter]

For legacy I/O like printers, serial ports, keyboard, mice, and even game controllers, there are inexpensive USB-to-oldstuff dongles that work really well.