PC Motherboard Floppy disk support.

[Prime]

Hi all,

As promised here's the results of my investigation of the motherboards I have or have had in the last few years with regards to their support for multiple floppy drives. I know this is notionally a 'software' forum, but it seemed the best place for this, if the admins disagree, then please feel free to move it. Also please feel free to make it sticky so that it is easier to find / add to.

Code: Select all

Motherboards know to support two floppy drives.

All boards also support High, Double and Single density unless stated 
otherwise.
Boards tested by Phill HS / Prime unless otherwise stated.

Board				Arch			Notes
Gigabyte GA-71XE	Athlon Slot A
Gigabyte GA-7ZX		Athlon 
Iwill KK266			Athlon
Iwill KK266-plus	Athlon
Asus A7M266-D		Athlon XP/MP
Asus A7V266E		Athlon XP		Supports 2 drives - cmjones01  
Asus A7V8X-X		Athlon XP 		Does not support 360K drives in BIOS.
Asus A7V600			Athlon XP 		Does not support 360K drives in BIOS.
Abit NF7-S			Athlon XP
ASRock K7S41GX		Athlon XP
ABIT AN8 Fatal1ty 	Athlon 64-939		
Shuttle SN68SG2		Athlon 64-AM2	Needed BIOS modification to enable 2 drives / 5.25"
Shuttle SG22SG2		Athlon 64-AM2	Needed BIOS modification to enable 2 drives / 5.25"
Shuttle FS50v1.3		Pentium		Native support for 2 drives & SD/DD/HD - Arcadian
Shuttle SB52G2 			Pentium		Native support for 2 drives & SD/DD/HD - IanB
Shuttle SB51G			Pentium		Native support for 2 drives & SD/DD/HD - IanB

Motheboards known **NOT** to support 2 floppies. 
This may be lack of BIOS support or that the floppy disk controller only physically
supports a single drive. 

Board				Arch			Notes
Intel D845GRG		Pentium 4
Intel D845HV		Pentium 4
Asus A8N-SLI series	Athlon 64-939	FDC only supports 1 drive.
Asus M2N-SLI Delux	Athlon 64-939	FDC only supports 1 drive.
MSI K8N Neo4-FDC	Athlon 64-939	FDC only supports 1 drive.
Gigabyte M61PME-S2	Athlon 64-AM2+	FDC only supports 1 drive.
ASRock N68-GS Fx	Athlon 64-AM3+	FDC only supports 1 drive.
Gigabyte GA-MA770	Athlon 64-AM3+	

Edit: 2016-09-24, Added Shuttle SG22S2.
Edit: 2016-09-30, Added boards verified by Arcadian, cmjones01, IanB

Cheers.

Phill.

[cmjones01]

To add to this, I've just been trying to connect various floppy drives to a couple of PCs here and I can report:
Asus A7V266E (socket A, Athlon XP) supports two drives, though mine seems to have stopped working
Intel SE440BX (slot 1, Pentium III) only supports one drive, though has ISA slots so I'm intending to add an Adaptec 1542 SCSI interface with a 'proper' floppy controller on board.

Chris

[Arcadian]

For reference - I've just tested a Shuttle with an FS50v1.3 motherboard, Intel Celeron 1.7Ghz processor and Windows XP. The BIOS supports two drives by default and Omniflop reads and writes 40T and 80T DFS floppies on both 3.5 and 5.25 media. However if writing an image, I need to format the disc on an actual BBC first - if I format it using Omniflop's built-in formatter, images will refuse to write. I've encountered this issue with other PCs.

[cmjones01]

I've just tested an Asus A7V333-X motherboard. It supports two floppy drives as standard, but the BIOS doesn't support 360K drives even though the manual says it should. This may be a BIOS version thing. I tried connecting a 360k drive and it fails the power-up self test because it only has 40 tracks. It may be that the drive would work if I disabled the boot time floppy seek.

A 1.2M 5.25" drive works fine, though, and reads 360k floppies under DOS and Linux without problems. I haven't tried Omniflop or similar yet.

Chris

[Prime]

Acording to this post : http://www.stardot.org.uk/forums/viewto ... f=3&t=7680
Shuttle SB52G2 and an SB51G also work.

Cheers.

Phill.

[Prime]

Whilst it doesn't support 2 floppies, I have an HP XW6400 at work that will format single density disks (in linux), and can write images to them.

Machine doesn't have windows so not tried omniflop.

Right, testing the motherboard from my old Gateway linux box (at home), that most definitely will let me fromat and write single density DFS disks from Linux that I can read on a Master. The motherboard is a ASRock N68C-GS FX, the motherboard that was perviously in this machine is a MSI K8N Neo4-F, which also allowed this. I will test them with XP / OmniFlop over the weekend.

The difference seems to be that the above boards use a Winbond LPC chip, whereas the other boards (e.g. the AMD Shuttles) use an ITE LPC chip. I'll write down the prescise chip numbers tonight.

For those that don't know on a modern motherboard, the LPC chip generally handles the things that used to be on the ISA bus, so generally things like Floppy disks, serial / parallel ports and often fan sensors.

Cheers.

Phill.

[Prime]

Just tested the HP XW6400 in XP and it works formatting and writing in OmniFlop, will test written disks in Beeb this evening.

Cheers.

Phill.

[Prime]

Ok after some more extensive research :

Boards with the folloing chips seem to work and will read / write AND format Acorn single density disks e.g. System, Atom, BBC DFS.

VIA VT82C686 (in A, B)
Winbond W83627HF
Winbond W83627EHG
Winbond W86327GF-AW
SMSC LPC47M182-NR

I'll attach my complete findings so far as an excel sheet.

Motherboard Floppy Capabilities.xlsx

Motherboard capabilities

(10.47 KiB) Downloaded 256 times

Cheers.

Phill.

[BBCB+64K]

Add the AsRock Conroe865PE to this list as when mine was working it could read/write DFS disks using OmniFlop under Windows 7 32-bit. I'm not sure which FDC it had on the motherboard.

Steve