As far as I am aware (and I very well could be wrong) there is no initialization on the old floppy bus, just a standard set of commands, so the OS doesn’t even bother to look at it until you try to use it. (Alternately, after the spec goes the other way, ignore the problem and put the blame on MS when it continuously tries to spin up an empty drive.)Īpat 2:15 Unfortunately I do not believe the Plug-and-Play system would know the floppy drive had been changed. So they had three options – spend a bunch of time and money lobbying for the spec to go your way, (potentially) spend a bunch of time and money to fix the problem if the spec goes the other way, or spend no money or time by keeping quiet about the whole thing and hope no one else notices. Wait, I can answer my own question – by the time people realized it was underspecified, there were already a bunch of floppy drives out there. It sounds compelling enough for me, but then I’m a geek, not a normal person.Īlso, when the hardware companies realized there was ambiguity in the spec, why didn’t someone (at the hardware companies, not at MS) point it out and get version 1.1 of the spec to resolve the ambiguity? Sadly, floppy insertion detection had to be abandoned. Press OK."įloppy disk insertion detection is not a sufficiently compelling feature that users will say, "I appreciate the benefit of going through this exercise." Before we begin, I'm going to turn on your floppy drive light and make grinding noises. Before we begin, please insert a floppy disk in drive A." You can't just try to figure out what type of drive the user has by comparing the clever technique against the boring "turn on the floppy drive light and make grinding noises" technique, at least not without displaying a warning to the user that you're about to do this-users tend to freak out when the floppy drive light turns on for no apparent reason. And you certainly don't want to make the user go through this training session when they unpack their computer on Christmas morning. You can't trust the OEM to have gone through the training, because OEMs change suppliers constantly depending on who gave them the best deal that week, and it's entirely likely that on the floor of the warehouse are a mix of both styles of floppy drive. First of all, a user who bought a computer with Windows 95 preinstalled would have bypassed the training session. Unfortunately, this plan fell short for many reasons. Once the disk was in, we could run the algorithm and see whether it returned 0 or 1 that would tell us which style of floppy drive we had. "Please insert a floppy disk into the drive and click Next.".One idea was to have an additional "training" step built into Setup: If you knew which style of drive you had, then the results were meaningful, but the hard part was deciding which style of drive the user had. The results were completely reliable within each "style" of floppy drive, but the two styles produce exactly opposite results. The floppy drive hardware specification left one aspect of the drive behavior unspecified, and studying the schematics for various floppy drive units revealed that about half of the floppy drive vendors chose to implement it one way, and half the other way. Working through the details of the specification revealed that, yes, if you issued just the right extremely clever sequence of commands, you could determine whether a disk was in the floppy drive without spinning up the drive.
WINDOWS 95 FLOPPY DISKS HOW MANY DRIVER
The person responsible for Windows 95's 32-bit floppy driver studied the floppy drive hardware specification and spotted an opportunity. In other words, Windows 95 almost had the ability to detect when a floppy disk was present in the drive without spinning up the drive. One feature which Windows 95 almost had was floppy disk insertion detection.
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