Windows 95 Almost Autodetected Floppy Disks

bonch writes "Windows 95 almost shipped with a technique for detecting whether a floppy disk was inserted without spinning up the drive. Microsoft's floppy driver developer discovered a sequence of commands that detected a disk without spinup — unfortunately, unspecified behavior in the floppy hardware specification meant that half the drives worked one way and half the other, each giving opposite results for the detection routine. Microsoft considered a dialog prompting the user to insert a disk to 'train' the routine, but the idea was scrapped."

Comments

Um

[linumax]

Why not do the behavior detection on first instance a floppy disk was used?

Re:Um

[mccdyl001]

damn wish i had mod points. and a shift key for that matter... anyway, surely there was a way for the operating system to poll the system using these 'magic' system commands to check if a disk had been inserted. so poll the system, see what it says - either a 1 or a 0, then spin up the drive and see what it actually says. heck do it as part of the system install. take a snapshot of the floppy drive device name or something at the same time. if the device name changes re-run this technique, cause if you swap the floppy with another drive which reports the same device name it'll still report 0 or 1 for the same type of disk insertion scenario so you fine, and if the floppy device name is diff, then re-run this technique. anyway, as part of the system install you could have polled if the disk was there, taken the answer, then actually spun up the drive and checked and bingo, your training is done1 damn what i could do with a shift key right now....