A78AX-S - need multiple floppies

rytomi · Thu Oct 08, 2009 5:11 am

I have a Foxconn A78AX-S motherboard and I need to connect 2 internal floppy drives. The way I understand it is that all floppy controllers support at least 2 floppies.

The problem is that the BIOS only has an option to recognize a single floppy. Is it possible to modify the BIOS to allow 2 floppy drives?

I would post a link to the BIOS file but I don't have 10 posts yet

rytomi · Sat Oct 10, 2009 3:46 am

Sooo... Anyone have an idea?

sharky · Sat Oct 10, 2009 4:27 am

rytomi wrote: The problem is that the BIOS only has an option to recognize a single floppy. Is it possible to modify the BIOS to allow 2 floppy drives?

You can often enable the second floppy drive after the OS has booted (check out superiotool), but I'm not 100% sure about resource allocation. Floppy is so ancient technology. No need to modify the BIOS in that case.

maxim · Sat Oct 10, 2009 11:06 pm

Just curious why you need a second floppy. if you need a diskcopy, many software can do it with one FD

rytomi · Sat Oct 10, 2009 11:11 pm

I have A LOT of old data on 5.25 disks, and I still use 3.5 disks as well. It would prohibitively time consuming to transfer all the data to another medium.

The motherboard will recognize one or the other as drive A, but there's no option for drive B in the BIOS.

I can't even figure out what superio tool is, let alone use it. I had someone on here fix a BIOS for me once before and it worked great, I was hoping for the same.

Sun Oct 11, 2009 11:57 am

Even if we did enable the second floppy and we got it to work, in case something goes wrong with your board you have no warranty.

Even though very time consuming, I suggest you transfer the data from those floppies to another medium as well as soon as possible. Because floppies do have a shelf-life after which they become unreadable. More than once a customer has had trouble reading stuff from floppies that were only 5 years old.

One other option: mount the 5.25" internal and get a 3.5" USB floppy drive. Not very expensive ad usable for your laptop too (that most likely came without a floppy drive as well.

rytomi · Sun Oct 11, 2009 5:18 pm

Well, as far as warranties go, I could really care less...

The thought had crossed my mind to make the 3.5 floppy usb. This board has 6 internal usb connectors and it would be great if I could find some kind of USB-to-floppy controller, or even just an internal usb floppy, but they don't seem to exist.

I'd rather not have an external drive, though that is what I will mostly likely resort to if I have no other option.

Fri Oct 16, 2009 10:46 am

Dell has laptop internal drives that come with an USB connector as well so you can use those internally and externally, I'm just not sure if there's a bracket to fit the thing in a desktop case.

Fri Oct 16, 2009 10:51 am

Some server casings come with a USB internal floppy drive. Prices are 35-50 US $ though...