On 4/8/2013 9:57 AM, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
OH! I thought, since the m/b is from '05 or '06, that it would detect the floppy drives, but*that* I need to look at. Thanks!
the floppy interface was really low level. all parallel signals, like select drive, step, direction, head select, serial data, clock, write enable, and a status line for home, and index (the hole in the disk that said its at sector 0).
the ONLY way to detect a drive is connected was to STEP outwards 100 times, checking for the 'home' status each time, this takes several seconds per drive. AFAIK, there was no way electrically to tell the difference between drive types, unless there's a reliable disk in the drive. so the BIOS's pretty much stopped doing the auto-home-and-detect thing early on when floppies became optional because it was /so/ slow and added significant time to POST. and even from the very beginning, you have to configure the BIOS for the drive types (heck, early hard disks had to be configured in the BIOS too)