Floppy disk drives

The minimal hardware requirements, which are certainly adequate for all items discussed here, are an IBM or IBM-compatible PC equipped with at least 640 K RAM, a single floppy disk drive, at least a 40-Mbyte hard disk drive, a CD-ROM drive, a VGA color monitor, and a printer. The basic point here is that hardware requirements are minimal and readily available. In the case of the laser disk products, a laser disk drive and high resolution (VGA) monitor are also required. 

Electrical appliance and PC brackets, components for floppy disk drives. .. 

Fig. 5.10 Computer-assisted extraction kinetics-measuring apparatus for highly stirred phases (A) high-speed stirrer (B) stirrer shaft (C) sample inlet (D) Teflon stirring har (E) Teflon phase separator (F) water hath (G) flow-cell (H) spectrophotometer (I) peristaltic pump (J) chart recorder (K) A/D converter (L) clock (M) minicomputer (N) dual-floppy disk drive (O) printer, (P) plotter. (From Ref. 16.)...

Floppy disk driver Telephone/cellular Consumer electric Head phone Spindle motor Floppy disk drive Optical disk drive Small appliance High Tech kitchen appliance Cordless power tool... 

If you ve ever used a really fast disk drive, you know that the Commodore 1541 drive leaves something to be desired— namely, speed. True, it s much faster than a normal Datassette, but it s still annoyingly slow compared with other floppy disk drives with high-speed parallel interfaces. 

Almost every computer made today uses some type of disk drive to store data and programs until they are needed. You ll learn the exact details of how they work later in Chapter 4, Disk System Architecture. Most drives need some kind of connection to the motherboard for the computer to talk to the disk drive. These connections are known as drive interfaces and there are two main types floppy drive interfaces and hard disk interfaces. Floppy disk interfaces allow floppy disk drives to be connected to the motherboard and, similarly, hard disk interfaces do the same for hard disks. When you see them on the motherboard, these interfaces are said to be on board, as opposed to being on an expansion card, known as off board. The interfaces consist of circuitry and a port. Most motherboards produced today include both the floppy disk and hard disk interfaces on the motherboard. 

Phoenix Technologies Phoenix Technologies was the pioneer who developed BIOS in the first place. Their BIOS software supports user-defined hard drive types and 1.44MB floppy disk drives. 

The first type are called floppy drive power connectors because they are most commonly used to power floppy disk drives. This type of connector is smaller and flatter (as shown in Figure 2.28) than any of the other types of power connectors. These connectors are also called Berg connectors. 

The type of removable media drive that is the most often described is the floppy disk drive. It is called that because the original medium was flexible. Floppy disks are like fixed disks, but they have only one platter encased in a plastic shell. There are several types of floppy disk drives available in many different capacities (Figure 4.4 shows a 1.44MB 31 -inch drive), and we will discuss them in the sections to come. 

I here are four major types of floppy disk drives in use today. They are usually identified by the size of the media they use and the capacity of that media. We ll cover each one and its associated configuration and troubleshooting issues. But before we do, let s discuss the four components of a floppy drive subsystem the disk (also called the medium), the drive, the controller, and the cable. 

The next item we need to discuss is the floppy disk drives themselves. There are three items we need to discuss regarding the drives media size, form factor, and capacity. 

There are three main types of form factors, or drive styles, available today. A form factor usually just means the physical dimensions and characteristics. Today s floppy disk drives use either the full-height, half-height, or combo form factors. Full-height drives were the only ones available for the first PCs. The drives were large and bulky and usually lower in capacity than today s drives. Half-height drives take up only half the space (vertically) of full-height drives. (Captain Obvious )... 

In the next section, you learned how floppy disk storage works, the basic components of a floppy disk subsystem, and how to install and configure a floppy disk system. You learned about the different types of floppy disks available (3.5" and 5.25"), as well as the different types of drives associated with each type. You also learned about the controller and cable used to hook the floppy disk drive to the system so that data can be stored on it. 

Choose the drop-down list under Backup To to pick which drive letter you want to back the files up to. If you pick a floppy disk drive (A or B in most systems), MSBACKUP will copy as many files as it can to the disk, then ask for a new, blank disk when it is full. 

Insert a blank, formatted 1.44MB floppy disk into your floppy disk drive. 

IBM PC A series of personal computers based on the Intel 8088 processor, introduced by IBM in mid-1981. The PC was released containing 16K of memory, expandable to 64K on the motherboard, and a monochrome video adapter incapable of displaying bit-mapped graphics. The floppy disk drive held 160K of data and programs. There was no hard disk on the original IBM PC that came later with the release of the IBM PC/XT. 

Before going any further, you should make sure that any files we create will be placed on the Floppy Disk drive a , This can be accomplished by changing the default directory to A . Select the Directory command. You will then be presented with the current directory name which can be edited to read ... 

CHEMBASE IBM 640K TWO FLOPPY DISK DRIVES (360 KB EACH) (HARD DISK DRIVE RECOMMENDED) REQUIRED IBM 4 COMPATIBLE, HERCULES... 

CHEMFILE IBM 256K TWO FLOPPY DISK DRIVES (HARD DISK OPTIONAL) OPTIONAL 6M COMPATO-E... 

Decentralized Input. The BEILSTEIN Computing Division has developed three microcomputer programs which enable the chemist to enter all the information from its respective source in a structured manner without any specific computer knowledge. All programs work on IBM-PCs and 100%-compatibles with at least 256K of memory and two floppy disk drives ... 

In practical situations, it s important to write robust software that operates reliably in the face of great difiiculty. For example, a user might try to write a file to a floppy disk drive that doesn t contain a diskette, or a calculation might inadvertently try to divide some value by zero. Professional software must be able to handle these and myriad other problems as intelligently and reliably as possible. 

The drives branch indicates that some decisions have already been made about the drives. The and gate indicates that both a hard disk drive and a floppy disk drive are desired. The constraint symbol indicates that internal... 

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