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Windows 10-compatible motherboard with dual floppy drives?

Fire-Flare

Experienced Member
Joined
Dec 17, 2009
Messages
273
Location
Washington State
I'm looking to run 3.5" and 5.25" floppy disks in a machine that will run Windows 10.

I've found some socket 478 and 775 boards that recognize dual floppies, but the hurdle for running Windows 10 on them is that they lack the Execute Disable Bit in their BIOS.

I'd prefer not to use a USB solution because I want to use my existing dual floppy drive and write to the disks: A feature that the 5.25" USB controllers I've found lack.


One further requirement is that I need an ITX or otherwise small motherboard because I'm stealthing the build inside an IBM 5150 chassis.
 
There are Core 2 Duo/Quad motherboards that have floppy controllers, but I'm not sure if the BIOS will support the 5.25 and 3.5 drives.

You might have better luck with an AMD solution, some of the AM2 and AM3 boards ( like the ASUS M4N78 ) have floppy ports.
 
I think it's gonna be a tough challenge to get all the necessary and still compatible ingredients together to meet this project's demands.

10 does not play nice with BIOS.

5¼" drives won't run with that hardware and don't really come in the USB flavor, anyway.

All in all it'll be quite a feat to put this together within reason so be sure to keep us informed as to how you finally end up doing it.
 
Before you start pulling those old motherboards out of mothballs, you are going to need to address the question of driver availability.


Latest OS:
Make sure you are running the latest version of either Windows 7 SP1 or Windows 8.1 Update.
Don’t know which version you are running? Check here to find out. Need to download the latest version? Click here for Windows 7 SP1 or Windows 8.1 Update.

Processor:
1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster processor or SoC

RAM:
1 gigabyte (GB) for 32-bit or 2 GB for 64-bit

Hard disk space:
16 GB for 32-bit OS 20 GB for 64-bit OS

Graphics card:
DirectX 9 or later with WDDM 1.0 driver

Display:
800x600
 
Before you start pulling those old motherboards out of mothballs, you are going to need to address the question of driver availability.

The M3A78 mentioned above has driver support in Windows 8.1 64 bit, so it will likely work with Windows 10 out of the box. Socket AM2 processors have the necessary instructions and speed to support Windows 10, it just won't be as fast as current hardware. Unfortunately, the BIOS only supports a single floppy drive (this may be a limitation of the AMD SB700 chipset).

However, nVidia made a number of AM2/2+ chipsets that do support two floppy drives. Finding one in the smaller form factor with the floppy connector supporting two drives might be the fun part....
 
Hmm... the modern motherboards with floppy controllers only support a single drive, but many do support 1.2mb 5.25/360k 5.25 still.

How about a 5.25 drive on the internal controller, and a USB connected 3.5 drive?
 
Please note that for some AMD chipsets, it is necessary to turn off the High Precision Event Timer in order to use the motherboard floppy controller.
 
I've seen this come up before and I think I have the best solution. This is the board I personally use in my garage. It is small, POWERFUL and has an extra cool factor of having 2 sockets.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon1333/5100/X7DCA-L.cfm

That said, the bios only supports one floppy drive. I worked around this by placing my 5.25 drive on the mobo and using an LS-120 drive as my 3.5 drive.
 
My msi x58m board supports only 1 floppy drive, but it supports 360kand 1.2m 5.25s and 720k and 1.44m 3.5s. there may also be a way to enable 2 drives. bit if youre going for the authentic 5150 look just use an original 5150 drive and have an external 3.5. That is the only newish board I know of to support it, and its micro atx, which would work perfectly with the 5 slots on the 5150.
 
No motherboards fit the 5150 case except 5150 boards, unless you cut up the back of the case. The slots are too far apart. IBM moved them closer together on the XT and that has been the standard ever since. You may have to cut the drive bays for clearance, as well.
 
The two floppy drive support is going to be very tough. Even in the MBs w/ FDD support the support had been limited to one drive - usually a 1.44MB. My last system to have full floppy support was a Pentium IV board w/ Dual Floppy supports from 360KB to 2.88. It also knew about ls-120/ls-240/zip drives in the BIOS. Of course that system still had ISA support as well! I'd be interested to see if you find any "newish" MB that support two floppy drives and maybe even ED (2.88) drives.
 
+1 for shadowlord

My garage pc has bios support for only one drive. however it does support everything for 360kb to 2.88mb. So i put mnt 5.25 1.4mb drive there. I used a usb 3.5 drive for a while and an LS-120 via pci->u66 card. works just fine. Its kinda funny to see a powerful quad core xeon with zip, 5.25, and ls120 on the front. ^.^
 
I seem to recall there was a few machines from the P4 and early Core2 era where the controller still supported two drives, however the BIOS omitted the code for configuring the second drive and electrically the ere was no connection between the socket and the controller. My MSI board is one of them.

I think we're approaching a point where it might be easier to salvage the appropriate controllers from junked P4 boards or something and drop them onto a fabbed PCB so we CAN get dual floppy support in a variety of formats and capacities, but it has a more modern USB interface. The Winbond W83627THF was a pretty common one. Also supports up to four floppy drives.
 
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+1 for shadowlord

My garage pc has bios support for only one drive. however it does support everything for 360kb to 2.88mb. So i put mnt 5.25 1.4mb drive there. I used a usb 3.5 drive for a while and an LS-120 via pci->u66 card. works just fine. Its kinda funny to see a powerful quad core xeon with zip, 5.25, and ls120 on the front. ^.^

Luckybob,

Your supports 2.88 drives and 5.25"? I checked the link you provided and it only mentioned 1.44MB drives. If it does 5.25" it becomes more interesting to me....
 
the bios claims to. i dont have a 2.88 drive to test it, but it does work fine with my 1.2 5.25 floppy.
 
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