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That would work until your floppy drive dies and you replace it. Then there's a 50% chance that your floppy drive always shows the wrong status (since there's
by sounddust 18y ago
That would work until your floppy drive dies and you replace it. Then there's a 50% chance that your floppy drive always shows the wrong status (since there's no plug-and-play with floppy drives, and therefore no way to know when to redo the bit check).
That alone would be enough of a reason to cut the feature; imagine how much tech support would go into supporting this one issue (at a time before the internet was ubiquitous).
- icefox 18y agoHow about rather then at installation time, but the first time someone queries for the floppy drive? Every time you boot it will always spin the drive the first time, but not after that. That seems much better then always spinning up the drive.
- icefox 18y agoNot to mention that they were Microsoft in the days of Windows95. If anyone could get floppy manufacture's to standardize they could.
- sounddust 18y agoI would guess that one problem with this approach is that in 1994/95, the setting for the existence of a floppy drive in the BIOS did not always work properly (and sometimes there was no setting for "no floppy"). Therefore, if windows tried to check for the floppy on boot when you had no floppy installed, it would hang the system for a long period of time.
- petercooper 18y agoIf someone replaced the drive, then if you erroneously detected a floppy's in the drive, you try to access it and.. nope, no disk there. So then you flip the system. Fixed. As far as I recall, the error codes for no disk versus an erroneous read were different, so you could just figure it out in case of a false positive.