What op sys and version do you want to run on it? Windows changed the way drivers work after Xp so it may be an isshe. That made replacement of older PCs that controlled equipment like xray, MRI, and industrial stuff impossible as the manufacturers couldn’t write new drivers — lost the knowledge thru mergers and retirements/buyouts.
As i say, i'm in the market for a laptop. Omniflop, the tool i used to write the RCA MicroDOS floppies, works well with Win2k, and i used a Dell GX1 running Win2K to write the disks. The direct drive-to-controller-to-OS links are what i'm after. No USB, Firewire, or serial/parallel interfaces between the controller and rest of the machine.Ideally, i'm after an early 2000's laptop. I've got a couple mid-2000's Dell laptops with floppy modules, but they interface over USB, which is a no-go for device-level stuff. I figure something from before, or the early days of USB 2.0 is where i need to look, but i've seen some machines that use/repurpose the parallel ports for floppy interfacing. If the SuperIO chip sends direct drive controls across the parallel port, as i've read somewhere, then i see no issue. But if the floppy controller is on the drive side of the parallel port, and the OS requires dedicated drivers to controll it, i imagine i won't have the drive-level control i require.
