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Manzana Microsystems Drivers

I

IBM Portable PC

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Manzana produced various drivers for their own FDC's, however I'm chasing a driver they produced called xdrive.sys.

Amongst other things, it allowed a 3rd FDD to be added to a system whose BIOS only supports 2 drives.

Please post whatever you have, there was also a 3FIVE.SYS driver I believe.

Any manuals would also be good.
 
There are several namings of that driver. SDRIVE, FLOPPY34, etc. I think it may have originated with Tulin. Here's SDRIVE.
 

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  • SDRIVE.ZIP
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I have a Manzana Microsystems Model MDQ 3.5 inch external floppy drive.
This came with an IBM 5155 I found several years ago. The drive attaches to
a Manzana 8-bit ISA card , and uses the 3FIVE.SYS driver.

The driver is loaded in config.sys as follows:

device=3five.sys /m
 

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  • 35.zip
    4.5 KB · Views: 1
My 5155 is somewhat buried at the moment ....but I did take a few pictures awhile back and one shows the card
installed in the system. You can see the blue cable running from the internal 5.25 floppy to the card. Next time I pull
out the 5155 I'll try to take a few more shots of the card itself. I think the IBM floppy controller must attach to the
Manzana card and then the blue cable goes from the Manzana card to the internal 5.25. The external 3.5 attaches
to a connector on the rear of the card.
 

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  • DSCF0123.jpg
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  • DSCF0125.jpg
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Found this info in a BYTE archive page:

3.5-inch External Floppy for PCs

Manzana's MDQ is an external 3 1 /2-inch host-
powered disk drive for the IBM PC and compatibles.
Besides upgrading PCs to 720K bytes of storage, the
MDQ can transfer data between different brands of laptop
and desktop computers.

For computers without an external drive port, Manzana
provides a mux adapter card that intercepts the signal and
power from the controller drive and sends it to the
MDQ drive.

The MDQ comes with Manzana's 3FIVE software, which includes a device
driver and format program that allows the 3V / 2-inch drive
to work with versions of PC-DOS or MS-DOS 2.0 or higher.

Price: $395; $355 (without mux adapter card).
Contact: Manzana Microsystems Inc.,
7334 Hollister Ave. , Suite B,
Goleta, CA 93117,
(805) 968-1387.
 
Just tried 3five.sys without a Manzana controller card.

device=3five.sys /m - reports that no MUX card is installed and appears to setup my A: drive as C: also at 720K (which it already is). When I DIR C: it shows me an A: drive DIR

device=3five.sys - does not appear to look for the MUX card. It also reports "720K DS 3.5 Drive C:
When I DIR C: it returns "Seek error reading drive C:" after about 30 seconds.

device=3five.sys /I - does not report an error.
A dir of C: reports the contents of B:




.....just googled and found:

Then you install the device driver.
3FIVE.SYS is available separately; a
copy of it is also included with each disk
drive and Mux Card sold by Manzana.
The driver can function without the Mux
Card; it would be useful if you were try-
ing to install a 3 Vi -inch drive in a system
running an early version of DOS— one
without DRIVER.SYS.
http://archive.org/stream/byte-maga...vs_386sx_Object_Oriented_Programming_djvu.txt
 
Last edited:
I just came across this post from a guy named John Elliott which said:
To get SDRIVE.SYS to work on my system, I had to change byte 1F9Bh of
the file from 0 to 1; this stops it trying to reset the floppy controller
(which for some reason fails).
Click to expand...

I've attached the hex edited file here for anyone who may benefit from it.
View attachment SDRIVE-mod.zip
 
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