On Sun, 15 Jan 2017, Gene Heskett wrote: > To add to the confusion, Martin, windows won the battle of fdc > capabilities around a decade back with the fdc chip makers. This $300
Hmm, no. More like the fdc's all became "IP" ("intellectual property module") verilog/vhdl to be added as an extra device in ASIC "super-io" designs. It is quite possible that one such base fdc "IP" module design used by lots of such super-io ASICs cut corners (or someone screwed it up, no way to know for sure), and did not implement the full spec, or did it badly. I would be hard pressed to tell you which super-io parts do have a non-joke fdc. The only thing I have that uses them is a MSX2+, and it has its own discrete FDC that has been working flawlessly for 25 years. > ASUS motherboard, when I bought it to build this machine in 2007, one of > the first to support the AMD Phenom quad core chips, has an fdc that is > unhappy with a 256 byte sector size, and will crash/lock this machine, > so bad that it takes the long push on the power button, doing a Are you sure this isn't a kernel driver issue? The Linux floppy driver doesn't see much love, and the people who *do* still use it are *not* good at helping. We don't see much posts of the "I will help" sort in LKML. > You'll have better, if slower, luck with rs-232 and zmodem. While true, it won't help boot an old x86 box :p You'd have better luck with PXE-based network boot, or something. Should be easy to find an old NIC with a PXE boot ROM for US$ 10 or so on ebay, if your old box lacks one :p -- Henrique Holschuh