external floppy drive questions

[CompositeGamer]

i am also curious about external floppy drives that use the parallel port or work through an expansion card.

are there any 1.2mb and 1.4mb external floppy drives that use a card or use a printer port that work on old computers like my tandy 1000 TX with standard parallel card installed?

i have seen some ibm drives with expansion cards but i believe the ones i saw were low density 5 1/4 drives.

i also know that some laptops have parallel drives.are these drives specially made for the specific laptop or will these drives work on any old/new computers parallel port?

also do external floppy drive become bootable?

thanks

[CompositeGamer]

read somewhere from a post or document information about the tandy 1000 floppy controller needing do be disabled with a program if you install a 1.4 mb floppy drive on the systems by using rom based isa cards.

i did download the nofloppy program for it but have not tested because this a future upgrade that i want to add and dont want spend the $ on a card if its not a worthy upgrade.

i have some games that ensist on being on a floppy and take more space than 720k.

my questions are will the 1.4 mb drive become the bootable drive if you have to disable the onboard bios after the system boots?will it still try to access original tandy low density drive or will it use the 1.4mb drive at bootup?

any help will be welcome

[NathanAllan]

I had a Tandy external 5.25 drive once, a few years ago, so they do exist. The place i got it from was Radio Shack in Carthage, TN, and they had a ton of old stuff that they would NOT let go for less than the price listed.

I'll call tomorrow and see if they have any more. The same guy has owned the place for 40 years now, so they let nothing go. I'll check.

Nathan

[CompositeGamer]

i seen a site where someone indeed had an internal 1.4 floppy drive working on a tandy 1000 TL or tandy SX.it had an 8 bit isa floppy controller with a bios(bios is requiered) and saying they had to disable onboard floppy with the nofloppy program.

im sure i would have to use an expansion card of some kind as the tandy TX doesn't have an external floppy port.

if i go the external route i wont have to go through the effort of installing a new drive internally.