2nd Floppy Drive

PCjr discussions !
Post Reply
User avatar
chuckphd53
Moderator
Moderator
Posts: 301
Joined: Fri Mar 20, 2020 3:45 pm

2nd Floppy Drive

Post by chuckphd53 »

Jiidari..

you mentioned you had an external floppy, what failed ???

here is the External Floppy Mod I did back in the 80's Still have the case and power supply but not using it... YET !

Image
https://www.pcjribm.com/pcjrfiles/Home_ ... py_Mod.pdf

it was a bit of a task to get it going, but it did work and was cheaper than a Racore or Rapport system upgrade...
it was great having TWO Floppies for copying files and playing games..
“I never commit to memory anything that can easily be looked up in a book.” (AE)
Jiidari
Poster2
Poster2
Posts: 5
Joined: Tue Mar 02, 2021 5:40 pm

Re: 2nd Floppy Drive

Post by Jiidari »

Hi Chuck,

Thanks for posting this. You know, I'm not actually sure what went wrong with the second drive. I vaguely recall that the internal drive failed, and I swapped the external one into that slot since I didn't have replacement on hand. This might have been 20 years ago, and I don't know what became of the external case and power supply.

My current thinking is that I'll eventually end up either with a hard drive, or perhaps an SD card cartridge adapter. I'm not certain, but it seems like that kind of solution would largely get rid of the need for a second floppy drive. One issue is that I recently tried booting up Dark Castle, and found it wanted disk B in drive B, and wouldn't let me just swap disks in drive A. I'm not sure if there's a way around that, or if piling all the files onto a hard drive would let the system run it from a single directory.
User avatar
chuckphd53
Moderator
Moderator
Posts: 301
Joined: Fri Mar 20, 2020 3:45 pm

Re: 2nd Floppy Drive

Post by chuckphd53 »

I sounds like the system thinks it has Two drives, this is why it asked for drive B:.
maybe your config.sys is set up for two drives..

are you using the original Jr Floppy controller ?
“I never commit to memory anything that can easily be looked up in a book.” (AE)
Jiidari
Poster2
Poster2
Posts: 5
Joined: Tue Mar 02, 2021 5:40 pm

Re: 2nd Floppy Drive

Post by Jiidari »

Oh, this makes perfect sense. My brother gave me the PCjr when he lost interest in it decades ago, and now I'm slowly figuring out how he set it up. The DOS disk I've been using sets the system up to use the full 640k memory and the now defunct 2-disk setup. I have another DOS floppy for a single drive setup, but that one doesn't find the extra ram he had soldered into the sidecar back in the 80's.

Either way, I'm going to eventually be booting from a hard drive or SD-cart, so correcting the drive setup isn't really a priority.

Thanks for the explanation though!
Post Reply