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Using a 3.5 floppy drive in a 5.25 drive.
you have to change the bios setting for the drive from 51/4 to 1.44 3.5
floppy "Maria" wrote in message ... Hello experts. I am hoping someone can help me. Can I change a 5.25" Floppy drive to a 3.5" floppy drive. I have checked the internet and found adapters but the one I tried did not work. Maybe it was just a bad one. My biggest problem is that I can not access any settings. The machine using the 5.25 drive only has a 3 line LCD display. Any ideas or recommendations would be very welcome. Or even if someone knows another news group that could help, that would be great too. Many thanks Maria PS Take out MM from email to reply by email |
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Yeah, that's my problem really. I don't know how to get into the BIOS. It's
not a "normal" PC. It's a machine with a 3 line LCD display. I think it is DOS based but the user interface is not PC like. "JAD" wrote in message rthlink.net... you have to change the bios setting for the drive from 51/4 to 1.44 3.5 floppy "Maria" wrote in message ... Hello experts. I am hoping someone can help me. Can I change a 5.25" Floppy drive to a 3.5" floppy drive. I have checked the internet and found adapters but the one I tried did not work. Maybe it was just a bad one. My biggest problem is that I can not access any settings. The machine using the 5.25 drive only has a 3 line LCD display. Any ideas or recommendations would be very welcome. Or even if someone knows another news group that could help, that would be great too. Many thanks Maria PS Take out MM from email to reply by email |
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"Maria" wrote in message ...
Can I change a 5.25" Floppy drive to a 3.5" floppy drive. I have checked the internet and found adapters but the one I tried did not work. Maybe it was just a bad one. My biggest problem is that I can not access any settings. The machine using the 5.25 drive only has a 3 line LCD display. The adapter you tried should have worked if you had disabled the computer's built-in floppy controller, but that requires getting into the BIOS. Somebody at www.wimsbios.com may know how to do that. Some adapters can also be set to alternative port addresses, but this often requires use of device driver software as well. The standard floppy controller can handle a 3.5" drive, at least in 720K mode. MS-DOS 5.0 and higher have a feature called DRIVPARM that can be inserted into the CONFIG.SYS file to add 3.5" support to computers whose BIOSes handle only 5.25" drives. The format is DRIVPARM=/D:d/F:f/i , where d=0 for A:, d=1 for B:, f=2 for 720K, f=7 for 1.44M (BIOS will probably have to be set for 1.2M), and /i means make DOS add 3.5" support when the BIOS doesn't have it. If your 5.25" drive is 360K and the hardware doesn't handle 1.2M, use f=2, even if the 3.5" drive is 1.44M, because the hardware won't support the double data rate used by 1.44M. But doing this may cause problems because most 1.44M drives are configured from the factory to detect the floppy density from the presense or absense of a square hole opposite the write-protect hole, and you'll probably have to either try to set the drive jumpers to always use 720K, or you'll have to tape over that hole. Be sure that the tape is secure and can't snag and come off inside the drive. Another way to get 3.5" support is with a device driver program, such as FDREAD, which should be available as FDREADxx (xx = 14, 16, or 17) at www.simutel.net or www.computercraft.com . |
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