Date   : Tue, 15 May 2012 07:45:26 -0500
From   : jules.richardson99@... (Jules Richardson)
Subject: Torch discs.

On 05/15/2012 03:01 AM, Jim Hearne wrote:
> Well....
> I took the 5.25" drive out of the BBC external housing, changed the drive
> select jumper to DS1 (as the PC likes).
> Found the correct IDC connector for the 5.25" drive and crimped it onto the
> existing floppy cable before the twist.
> Fitted the drive into the PC, put it all back together.
>
> Powered up, went into the Bios to enable floppy drive B, and found no
> options for B drive !!
> It seems that most newer motherboards (this one is about 2 years old) have
> removed support for 2 floppy drives.
> Pretty sure this is just a Bios thing, i doubt if they would have removed
> the DS line from the FDC.

Yes, probably just BIOS (on a somewhat-related note, the BIOS in my main 
imaging machine on this side of the Atlantic lacks direct support for DD 
5.25" drives).  I have seen HP machines which do genuinely lack hardware 
support for a second drive, but I don't expect that's common...

Although what's stopping you from temporarily making the 5.25" drive the 
first floppy in the machine, purely while creating disk images?

> So far the most likely option seems to be to edit the CMOS ram directly to
> change byte 0x10 to the settings for 2 drives.
> But, changing the byte means changing the CMOS checksum otherwise you just
> get a CMOS checksum error.
> So, i've got to work that out as well.

I do find that modern OSes get in the way of stuff like this; Imagedisk 
will let you specify the drive type regardless of any CMOS settings, but as 
I mentioned it does run via MSDOS, so it may not be the easiest solution in 
some situations :-)

> Otherwise, i may just invest in a Kyroflux USB floppy interface.

Can Kryoflux give you a byte-oriented copy of the disk? My understanding 
was that it - like Discferret and Catweasel - worked solely at the 
transition level, but perhaps it does come with tools to translate that 
into a more accessible format.

Personally I'd ask around on freecycle etc. first and grab a few PCs, one 
of which should do the job.

cheers

Jules