5.25" Floppy Support

[BigAlY2K]

Again, any motherboard AT and later uses the same type floppy controller, which is CAPABLE of supporting TWO floppy drives (but limited to accessing only one at a time.) Manufacturers simply chose to remove the option from the BIOS on later models, thinking nobody would need to use a 5.25" floppy with a system that new and to make it less confusing for novice users. A Dell XPS 420, for example, has the options for "Off", "USB", "Internal", and a fourth one I can't remember right now. In other words, it EXPECTS a 3.5" 1.44 MB floppy drive, and it's either enabled or disabled. There's no option to select what type of floppy is attached, let alone a second drive.

I suspect that a BIOS mod for that system might be difficult at best, but with most aftermarket boards, I would think it would be somewhat straightforward for someone who knows how to do this. The Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-US2H, for example, will accept a 5.25" floppy, but does not have a B: drive selection. That's a problem as even if you were to use a USB 3.5" floppy, it would become the B: drive with no avenue to swap the letter assignment as this is controlled at the BIOS level. I don't know of many scenarios where you'd want your drives assigned that way.

A Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4 (Socket AM2 with an nForce 570 chipset) has dual floppy capability BY DEFAULT. I'm hellbent on maintaining one for this reason. I would just like to add the option in to other boards, and/or Intel based systems. Seems as if support for dual floppies is dropped with Core 2 CPU support... best I could do with what I could obtain was a GA-8I945GMF, which only supports Pentium Ds. It was ADEQUATE for Windows 10 at best. That said, I think that board is faulty but that's a separate discussion entirely...