On a new drive this could be hard to do but the older ones had
jumpers and switches and I've seen a few that had a dip socket with
wires in it (jumpers). When IBM started building PCs, instead of
changing the jumpers on the drives they added a twist to the cable
for FDD addressing. Personally I thought this was a really dumb thing
to do since it makes it difficult to add more than two FDDs to a PC.
Standard FDD controllers used to support 4 drives at the hardware
level but if you put the twist in the cable you can't address them
properly. I've had as many as 8 FDDs connetected to one computer (not
a wintel system) back before there were HDDs cheap enough you could
dream about owning.

Floppy disk drives also have terminators like SCSI devices. However,
you don't usually have to worry about these.

I have seen ne PCs out of the box that would not boot because this
jumper was in the wrong place. In these cases they only had one drive
but the result was similar to your problem.



On Wed, 9 Dec 1998 10:10:20 -0600, Jeffrey Delzer wrote:

>Could someone clarify this, please? This is the first that I've
heard
>about floppy drives having jumpers or caring whether they are
primary
>(A:) or secondary (B:).

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