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Pulling data off of 5.25" disks

acheron

acheron

Diamond Member
Ok, so what's my best bet for attempting to pull data off of old floppies? If I buy an old 5.25" drive off of ebay or whatnot, is it going to work with my newish (~2008) MB and Windows 7 (though I suppose there's nothing stopping me from booting into a different OS)? As far as I can tell there are no native USB 5.25" drives, though I have seen conversion kit things that let you build one, so I suppose that's an option. I've looked around a bit and haven't found any old PCs available; at least, nothing old enough that would be much different (Craigslist is full of Pentium 4s and the like).

What do you guys think?
 
If you have a floppy port on the motherboard, I'd be sort of surprised if the 5.25" drive didn't work. I feel like if the bios has support for floppy drives at all it'll support any legacy floppy drive. Then again I haven't used a 5.25" floppy drive since the 90s so who knows?

I think you will need an old school floppy cable though. IIRC 5.25" drives connected using a a card type connecter and the floppy cable needed a female receiver for it. Cables that had connectors for both the 34pin newer style and the old card port used to be common. I might even have one in my big box of obsolete cables.

I've read mixed reviews about those USB drive kits as far as reliability goes unfortunately, and that was with 3.5" drives.

LOL, or as Blain suggested there is this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-External-Parallel-Port-5-25-Floppy-Drive-5-/150810857084 Mother of god. Watch out for the $16 shipping, lack of AC adapter and the fact that its untested though. It would be kind of hilarious to have on your desk though.
 
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Might want to make sure the drive is HD (1.2Mb) if you are not sure whether or not the disks to be read are HD or DD, or if they're not labeled accordingly.

I think that DDs will have a reinforcement ring for the spindle hole that HD floppies don't, but not 100% certain this is consistent for all of them.
 
This can be problematic because in the era that floppy disks were used the operatings systems and versions of dos were not standardized. Often the disks also had things like virutual RAM disks implementations requiring drivers to load the it into DOS high memory or something like that.

Brings back memories of the color computer and the Tandy 1000a.

If you are going to try this first get the drive and test it thoroghly before putting the good data in. Dust can kill a floppy. Make sure it is not full of dust. Maybe try a cleaning disk first.

I think I have thrown out all my old 5.25 stuff. The color computer use to have 5.25 disks. so did my Tandy 1000A, along with a 20 meg hard drive.
 
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Are these PC floppies?
I think that Apple, Atari and Commodore each had different floppy disk data protocols.
There's probably data conversion companies that could copy the data to CD's for a fee.
 
Find an old computer. You can probably get one cheaper than a new floppy drive. Preferably one that is running windows 98 so that it can transfer the data to a usb flash or LAN or something.
 
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