Hardware backward compatibility: The finicky floppy drive

Raymond Chen

I think the behavior is more petulant than finicky, but finicky is alliterative. Back in the days of Windows 95, I was talking with the person responsible for, among other things, the floppy disk driver, and I learned about a particular driver hack that was needed to work around a flaw in a very common motherboard chipset.

Apparently the floppy disk controller in this chipset was very picky about how you talked to it. If the very first command it receives after power-on is a read request, and there is no disk in the drive, the controller chip hangs unrecoverably. Issuing a reset to the chip has no effect. It’s gone. You have to power-cycle the machine and try again.

Raymond Chen

Follow