I would have borrowed a 2nd floppy drive from another system, done the
copy, and returned the floppy drive. It would probably have been faster.
On Mon, 26 Jul 2021, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
You know, that's an excellent idea and I wish I'd thought of it then.
My desktop was an IBM PC-AT and would have made this difficult, and
mostly we used IBM PS/2 boxes, which still made it non-trivial -- no
dangling a drive from the controller cable! But it was doable.
On 5150/5016 (PC/XT), there was a DC37 on the back panel of the FDC for
two external floppies.
IBM did sell external 5.25" (both 360K and 1.2M!) and 3.5" floppy drives.
At one point, they included brackets with a DC37, including a DC37 on a
bracket to fit some models of PS/2.
(I used to have an IBM 1.2M external drive, although I never used the
PS/2 bracket.)
I had several A-B-C-D DC37 switch boxes. One for the multiple controller
boards (Cordata, EiconScript, JRAM+?) for my Cordata (CX engine) laser
printer; and a few for machines where I had multiple external floppy
drives.
3" (both SS and DS, because my DS wouldn't let me at the second
side of SS flippy),
3.25",
3.5",
3.5" 67.5tpi,
100tpi 5.25" (Micropolis),
IBM 1.2M external,
8",
Weltek, and
tape drives)
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
