Foone🏳️⚧️
just watched an intro to a video game pretending to be a windows 95 pc.
the creators clearly understood:
1. that 90s computers often made floppy drive noises while they booted
2. that windows 95 had that famous startup screen with the spinning bar at the bottom
but they did not understand:
3. how these two things were related to each other, in time.
apparently the BIOS checks the floppy drives WHILE windows is booting!
Foone🏳️⚧️
The density check is to figure out if you have a double density or high density disk drive. Older BIOSes (early 90s?) seemed to do this more often, later on we just assumed HD.
The distinctive buzz-buzz sound is because the controller is moving the drive head from track 0 to 79, and back again.
On an HD 80-track drive, this'll work. On a DD (40-track) drive, it'll actually only go to track 39 and get stuck there. Then when it tries to go back to 0, it'll hit zero early
Foone🏳️⚧️
technical info:
So the bios accesses the floppy drives in two ways at boot, which make different noises.
1. density check (not all bioses do this): bzzz bzzz
2. boot disk check (mushy click or single click)
Foone🏳️⚧️
There's a large variation in the number of sounds you can get, actually. Different BIOSes and setups all change how it sounds.
For example, the system I grew up with had two drives, a 3.5" and 5.25". The system had to density check both, but they had different speed motors, so they made different tones. It density checked A, then B, then tried to boot off A: This gave it a distinctive two-descending-tones-then-click boot sound.
Foone🏳️⚧️
The floppy noises can't happen later. They happen when the system is trying to boot from a floppy, which is a thing that has to happen /before/ windows 95 loads
Foone🏳️⚧️
this is because if the system is already loading windows 95, it by definition isn't looking at floppy drives to boot from. It has already started booting, and not from a floppy drive.
Foone🏳️⚧️
So the click is a check for a disk: The BIOS is trying to boot off a disk if one is inserted.
when this fails, it'll try booting the hard drive... and THIS is when you should see the Windows 95 logo.
Foone🏳️⚧️
Noise 2: *click* or *mushy click* is the sound of the BIOS checking a floppy drive for a disk.
It'll be one of two sounds (well, three if there's a disk in there) depending on your drive model. Some of them make a very faint click, and some of them spin up motors. Cheaper ones are generally louder.
Foone🏳️⚧️
so that buzz-buzz happens because the BIOS is trying to determine if the drive is 80 or 40 tracks, and thus HD or DD.
It needs that for Noise 2:
Foone🏳️⚧️
The drive has a physical "am I on track 0" sensor which triggers and makes the move-track command from the floppy controller fail.
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