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IDE Floppy Drive
I found an IDE Floppy Drive

New MessageIDE Floppy Drive (modified 0 times) NotMyRealName
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I recently obtained a Mac USB SuperDisk Drive. I opened it up in true hacker fashion only to find that the drive itself is IDE. it has a standard 40 pin connector and a floppy style power connector. I hooked it up to my test machine (a mini-tower P90) and it read under windows as "Removable Drive D:" with no installation of drivers. It read a 3.5" disk no problem. Tonight I will put on my I-Opener and see if I can make it work. It might even boot if I can make it Primary Master. If any one has tried this and failed please post it here.
12-27-2001 14:18:29

New MessageRE:IDE Floppy Drive (modified 0 times) BigDog
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Was that the Imation USB Superdisk drive ??
12-27-2001 16:15:55

New MessageRE:IDE Floppy Drive (modified 0 times) NotMyRealName
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Yes, it was an Imation External SuperDisk for Macintosh until i took it out of the case. And i didn't get it put into my I-O tonight, had to work on my heater. (got to be warm so i can work, maybe tomorrow).
12-27-2001 20:44:03

New MessageRE:IDE Floppy Drive (modified 0 times) NotMyRealName
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Got that SuperDisk drive plugged in, but it wouldn't recognize on the I-O. It showed as a CD Drive (as oppossed to a Removable Drive on the test machine) and it wouldn't read any disks. Is the IDE controller on the I-O different from PC standard. My I-O also won't recognize my Multi-Read CD Drive as being on the system, though it picks up my 24x CD Drive no problem. I am now officially confused.
01-02-2002 13:09:00

New MessageRE:IDE Floppy Drive (modified 0 times) Kudzu
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Got that SuperDisk drive plugged in, but it wouldn't recognize on the I-O. It showed as a CD Drive (as oppossed to a Removable Drive on the test machine) and it wouldn't read any disks. Is the IDE controller on the I-O different from PC standard.

The IDE controller on the IO doesn't vary from the PC standard. The I-Opener bios simply doesn't have LS-120 support, which may be why your superdisk isn't detected properly.

Try asking the resident bios expert, WildPencil, about it.

01-03-2002 00:23:55

New MessageRE:IDE Floppy Drive (modified 0 times) NotMyRealName
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Oh, thanks for the info.

That explains why Windows didn't pick it up either. (i found out that Imation also put out a IDE version of their superdisk and that drivers for it came with win95b and newer)

If anyone can get in touch with wildpencil and get his thoughts, that would be great. Till then, I'll just use my ethernet for data transfer.

01-05-2002 21:49:41

New MessageRE:IDE Floppy Drive (modified 1 times) Wild_Pencil
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Adding LS-120 support to the BIOS isn't going to be easy. Everything I've added has come from freely available code (Smart Boot Manager and some code contributed by Programmer), or from small patches to work around a few crippling problems. This is intentional, as I want the BIOS to be as legal as possible in all IOpeners that use it.

It *might* be possible to refresh the whole IDE Device List by using Smart Boot Manager's "scan" function. If I recall, this function was supposed to overwrite the IDE drive table that the BIOS detected. I never got the scan function to work right on my test machines, and I haven't had the time to dive into SBM's source code to figure out why.

The only other way to do this is to pull in BIOS code fragments from a similarly equipped machine, to create a sort of hybrid BIOS. I've done a few experiments along these lines (the "Special Edition" BIOS for added LCD support), but I could never get the onboard sound working in the hybrid, and I could never get the hybrid to boot without pre-loading the CMOS with "known-good" values before hot-swapping BIOS chips. Those problems pretty much ruined the experiment.

-WP

01-06-2002 00:59:23

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