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I have an Asus P5VD2VM mobo. I have a 3,5" floppy drive connected at A:. How do I connect a 5,25" floppy drive at B:? The system BIOS does not seem to contain that option.

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  • also, do we actually need a 5.25 tag? isn't it a bit ambiguous, and localized?
    – Journeyman Geek
    Jun 10, 2012 at 11:40

2 Answers 2

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Its not very likely you can - A: and B: being reserved are a historical artifact, and I do distinctly recall, granted this was a very long time ago that when you had more than one 5.25 inch floppy drive, each had a separate controller card (this was pre IDE).

What I don't remember is if they used a standard floppy controller of the type you would find on a 'modern' floppy.

In addition your motherboard at most would have a single floppy drive connector (which the manual confirms). As is, you would have nowhere to plug in a second drive - and as such it shouldn't show up in the system bios on a vanilla motherboard without a controller card.

If you had a suitable card to run additional floppy drives, it will very likely take care of the boot related changes needed.

Finally A: and B: is a dos/windows/cpm(maybe) ism. The OS should handle that.

Quite simply, running a dual floppy system without additional hardware to take care of the grotty bits isn't something ASUS thought was likely enough to have an option for in the hard drive.

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    One floppy cable is for two drives.
    – kinokijuf
    Jun 10, 2012 at 18:31
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I have a 3½ flopy drive connected at A:. How do I connect a 5¼ floppy drive at B:?

Ancient systems had separate floppy controllers. The more recent ones such as your motherboard have that controller on the motherboard. These are usually used with a flat ribbin cable with three plug on it; one for in the motherboard, one (at the other end) for a floppy drive which usually gets mapped to /dev/fd0 or to A:, and the third connector in the middle is for a second floppy drive. (/dev/fd1 or B:)

Best guess at this point: You have a cable with only two connectors. In which case the answer is to get a different cable. The 'normal' one usually has a twist in part of the cable, which is the part which makes the end of the cable act as connector for A: and the middle one for B:. There are also straight cables, in which case you will need to set a jumper on the floppy drive.

The system BIOS does not seem to contain that option.

As far as I can remember (Last I used floppies was 2009-ish!) the BIOS might not show you a drive B: until it is physically connected.

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