Figure 2.15 illustrates a representative hardware configuration for a floppy controller.
Figure 2.15 Floppy Controller Hardware Configuration
The floppy controller in Figure 2.15 is connected to a system DMA controller channel, and its disk drives might be for different-sized media. As mentioned in Section 2.4.3, the NT HAL coordinates access to the system’s DMA controller(s) and to appropriate DMA channels and/or registers for slave DMA devices like the floppy controller in Figure 2.15.
Figure 2.16 illustrates the corresponding layered drivers for the floppy controller and drives.
Figure 2.16 Floppy Driver Layers
The system floppy controller driver can support up to four floppy drives, although only two floppy drives are shown in Figure 2.15.
The NT FAT file system handles files on unpartitionable removable media. While the system has other NT file systems for disk media, they do not support file I/O on diskettes.