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Is a manual A/B drive select switch possible?

Torch

Torch

Experienced Member
Joined
Sep 7, 2018
Messages
172
Location
Indiana
I have an almost perfect tweener PC that I bough new back in '04. It came with a DVD RW and below that a 3.5 floppy. Also has 8 USB ports, 2 real serial ports, a parallel printer port and a multi card reader.
My main goal is to make various bootable 5¼ 360K DOS disks for my Tandy 1000EX. I just bought a Mitsumi D509V3 and installed an external toggle switch to choose between LD and HD. Works great, I can make DD 360K disks all day long that work perfect in the EX and with the flip of a switch I'm back to making HD 1.2mb disks.

The big downside to this PC is that the MB/BIOS only supports one floppy drive. I'd like to keep the 3.5 drive (I have P70s I like to move files to), but it'll be a pain going inside to move the cable each time I want to swap.
Would it be possible to keep both drives on the cable, but swap one or two wires using a SPDT or DPDT switch so that the system only recognizes one drive?
I'm thinking just switching the drive select would do it, or would I need more such as motor enable?

Thanks!
 
krebizfan said:
You may be able to get it to work. http://www.seasip.info/VintagePC/floppies.html shows an example of how to have two drives on the same ID with a switch to change the drive in use. I think it may be necessary to change the floppy settings and reboot each the switch is changed.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the link. The "two drive monte" is what I was thinking of doing. :)
It'll definitely need a reboot to change the bios from the 5¼ to the 3½.
 

Use this with a boot menu that has driver.sys loading the drive into whatever format you want.
 
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