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June 22nd, 2019 23:00
Vostro 200 MT, install a floppy drive
Hi all,
This may be a strange statement but I have installed a 3.5 floppy drive into my Vostro 200 MT. Why? I still use one program on a floppy disk which is no longer available. I found a working floppy drive and ribbon cable from a donor AMD computer and installed it into the Vostro 200 but it will not work. I went into the setup and the floppy is showing up ok but it still wont work. Do I need a driver for this floppy? Or is it the ribbon cable?
Thank you for any suggestions in advance. Rob
I
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speedstep
9 Legend
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47K Posts
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June 23rd, 2019 03:00
Drive Cable Select may be wrong and windows 10 does not support floppy disks.
There is a POWER and Data cable involved in floppy drive setup.
Another problem with in-the-case floppy drives is no BIOS support with newer motherboards hence the need to use a USB Floppy drive
https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B000W6BUKQ/
Okmeque1
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November 26th, 2023 20:40
@speedstep what do you mean by "Cable select may be wrong"? Cable select is for IDE drives and most FDD don't use an IDE interface. The way that floppy cabled work is the twist : Drive B: is always BEFORE the twist and drive A: is AFTER the twist. Also the Vostro 200 has a floppy connector. Why would Dell goto the effort to put the connector on the board if you can't use it?
EDIT : If you have a program on floppy, you ain't using W10. Not that the V200, a system from 2007 would run it. At best you would luck out with Win7. The reason is most floppy disks programs are 32 or 16 bit, not compatible with Win64. Ideally for FDD you want to use Windows XP. Next time take into account more things like 720 or 1440KB disks, checking if Cable select is a thing on these cables and a lot more
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Okmeque1
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November 26th, 2023 20:41
Another thing is that there are only 2 BIOS options that control the floppy drive : one to enable the FDC and one to set the drive as either None or 1.44M. Also just because the drive works doesn't mean that your disk isn't dead : I had working drives stop working after I put a broken disc and then the heads mess up. So clean the heads(with alcohol or with a drive cleaning diskette) and re-lubricate the head screw (lithium grease) and try again. If you have more floppies, try reading them and if ALL of them fail it means that the drive is broke. More tips : use a cable with a twist to set as drive A: otherwise the FDD will register as B: and, remember how I said "to set the drive as either None or 1.44M"? It assumes the drive is a 1.44MB drive but if you put a 720K floppy it reads what it thinks is data but in reality is garbage/If you use a 720K FDD, probably receives commands to back the head by 1 and so it would overflow and the FDC isn't smart and can't return an understandable error.
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bradthetechnut
7 Technologist
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December 15th, 2023 01:53
May be easier to just use external floppy disk drive.