July 27th, 2010

Hardware backward compatibility: The finicky floppy drive

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.

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Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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