old flopy drive on parallel port
Warren Block
wblock at wonkity.com
Mon Dec 29 00:41:33 UTC 2008
On Sat, 27 Dec 2008, Matthias Apitz wrote:
> I've just thrown away an very old laptop which was running FreeBSD 2.2.5
> in the mid of the 90's; this have had an external 3.5 inch floppy drive,
> connected through a cable to the parallel port and this way fully supported,
> even for the basic installation of FreeBSD which was based on making a
> boot-able floppy; I saved this drive because I still have some old
> floppies here around and at home no other drive to read them;
Support may have been through hardware on the laptop. ISTR some old
machines doing that: a special parallel-port floppy would be seen by the
system, and the OS wouldn't know the difference.
> My question is: can it be used / plug'eg in without any danger into to parallel
> port of my actual laptop (Fujitsu Siemens) and is this somehow still supported
> in FreeBSD 7.0 as well?
If it was hardware supported by the old laptop, it could do bad things
to a current system. Physical "let the smoke out" things.
External USB floppy drives are cheap, although I don't know how well
they work with FreeBSD.
-Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota USA
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