Floppy Drive Cable Fiasco

[Al_The_Man]

I know that probabally the end is in sight for the 3-1/2" floppy, but everytime I have to make a 34p ribbon cable up for a floppy, I curse those IBM engineers who in their infinite wisdom screwed up a perfectly good system. Anyone who has had to make a cable up know what I mean, slitting the cable and twisting the conductors over so that the addressing is OK.
Actually the floppy manufactures back in the 80's had already allowed to put up to four floppies on the 34p ribbon without any problem, just as hard drives are done today.
But those IBM guys, I guess figured that it was too hard to set a jumper on the drive to enable 1,2,3 or 4 so they dreamed up this stupid method so that you can install up to two floppies without the pressure of changing the address jumper.

Al

[JFettig]

So what are you trying to say now? I have cut down floppy cables, but Im guessing your making a long one? I had to replace a floppy in a power path, Its amasing how long those cables are

If your using newer windows, they make usb floppy drives wich may fix your problem?


Jon

[Mechanoid]

Originally Posted by JFettig If your using newer windows, they make usb floppy drives wich may fix your problem?

Ever tried to boot from one? I guess new BOISes may know how to boot from USB floppies, but I have not seen any one that would.

I recently installed Windows Server 2003 on a floppy-less machine with a SCSI controller. At one moment, setup asked me to insert a floppy with SCSI driver. It was the year 2003 when the Server 2003 was engineered, so I did not even think twice before burning the driver files into a root directory of a CDR. You think it tried to read it? Yeah, right! That setup proggie asked me if I really think that was a floppy disk to roll it into a tight scroll and stick it and then install a real floppy... Sorry, I got a bit carried away. Microsoft recommended either making a custom installation CD by "slipstreaming" the original with the driver (I tried to imagine how this verb would have been formed... then took an attempt at finding its synonyms - "to gumshoegush" was perhaps the best), or to connect a floppy drive to the server. Nice. Did I already mention that this was the year 2003?

I found a floppy connector when took the box apart, and then I did not slipstream that day.