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What's the best way to get an external FDD onto a Tandy 1000?

Here is the 1000SL's pre-punched floppy cable on the right, with my attempt a modifying a standard PC floppy cable on the left:

DSC00756.jpg
 
While I continue to wait for necessary parts and cables to arrive in the mail, here's a follow-up question:

Inside my Tandy, I already have a punched-out floppy cable. It just has card-edge connectors on it for two 5-1/4 drives. Would there be anything wrong with simply re-crimping this cable, adding 34-pin socket connectors for a couple of 3-1/2 drives?

As it is now, the cable goes:

[Socket connector for floppy controller]=====[holes]=======[5.25 connector]==============[5.25 connector]

Could I simply cut off the second connector and slide some IDC crimp sockets on, making it the cable:

[Socket connector]======[holes]==========[5.25 connector]==[3.5 connector]==========[3.5 connector]
 
No, nothing wrong with that. But why go though the bother when you can get cables just about anywhere?
 
Whelp, I'm stumped. I finally got a power cable that would let me try installing a diskette drive for the first time. I've modified a floppy cable as pictured above, plugged the drive in, and run setup, setting the drive to 3-1/2... but it doesn't recognize the drive, and when I put a disk in, I hear it spin, but the indicator light doesn't flash. I just get a message, "Not ready error reading drive A" or B. No idea what to do here.

EDIT: Hell, it's probably because I have only the 3-1/2 installed in there, and since it's hard-soldered for ds1, the system can't pick it up without a ds0 drive on the cable too. Looks like I have to wait for more parts before I can fix this. :)
 
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Aaaand stumped again. I tried putting the 5.25 drive back into the box, with that set up as the A: drive and the 3.5 drive set up as the B: drive. Of course the original Teac FD-55BR sitting in there is still jumpered for ds0, and the 3.5 drive can't be changed from ds1. But when I had them both hooked up and configured the Setupsl for two drives, it was treating the Teac as both the A: drive and the B: drive (lighting up the indicator on the 5.25 drive whenever I told DOS to change to either A: or B:) and not recognizing the new 3.5 drive at all, just like it was doing when that was the only drive plugged in. I thought it might have something to do with the TM jumper on the Teac drive, but there doesn't even seem to be one on that particular piece.

What the heck is going on here? Do I just have a bad floppy drive, or something that the Tandy can't recognize at all?
 
Tony Waldron said:
Hi,
I'm pretty sure the only other drive you can use with this computer has to be a full 720kb drive.
Click to expand...

No, I have a standard 1.44 MB drive in my 1000SL, running in 720 KB mode. I did, however, use the original Tandy floppy cable, as I was lucky to find a card edge-to-pin type adapter that was long enough to reach. I tried modifying a standard floppy cable, but I could never get it to work -- however I kept the twist in the cable and tried setting up the drives as both DS1, and that's probably where it went wrong. As others have said, Tandys weren't designed to use the twist, and prefer to use a non-twisted cable with the drives set up as DS1 (B:, middle of cable) and DS0 (A:, end of cable).
 
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