Slashdot Mirror

Grab your existing 5 1/4" 360K or 1.2M floppy drive and plug it into one of these USB controllers: http://www.deviceside.com/fc50...

I've /never/ found a 5.25" or 8" floppy drive with a USB interface

Well, there's this: http://www.deviceside.com/

From my experience the 5.25" floppy disks in general were slightly more reliable, but the drives went out of style early enough that it didn't matter. You couldn't really convince people - mac users especially but plenty of other PC users as well - to retrofit 5.25" floppy drives into their computers. Even worse, to the best of my knowledge nobody ever made a USB 5.25 floppy drive which was arguably the final nail in the coffin for that format.

Well, I couldn't find a pre-built drive, per se; but here is a 5.25 USB floppy controller/adapter that should work with most floppy mechanisms.

It would seem you aren't entirely out of luck. The FC5025 Floppy controller can be combined with the TEAC FD55GFR in order to read Apple II disks.

Personally, the biggest issue that I see when I have encountered this type of situation is that the original programs are on floppies. If this is the case, you will need to find somebody with a Windows/95 machine that they're keeping together with spit, bailing wire, gaffer's tape and good intentions - you should be able to copy the program onto a USB key and then burn it on a CD/DVD for more permanent storage.

3.5" floppies are no problem - although getting a bit scarce, it's still pretty easy to get USB-connected floppy drives. It's the 5.25" floppies that are hard. Although I didn't expect to need to do this, I recently found that life would be better if I could get a bunch of data that lives only in a few files of 5.25" floppies.

There are a number of solutions to this, but few are just plug-and-play. It also depends on whether you need to be able to read and write the floppy as an application would, or whether you just want to scrape the bits off and save them in some kind of container on another filesystem. (I was looking for IBM-format floppies, but realized while I was researching this, that this is probably the time to grab the data off my old Commodore floppies as well - I was surprised to find that many of these 5.25" interface solutions are capable of reading floppies from darn near anything - C64, Apple, Atari, Amiga, etc. As a result, a couple of these are C64-centric, and some are read-only.)

BTW - Lots of folks will say that disks this old cannot be read. IMO, you'd be surprised how often the data is intact even after decades. I suppose it has something to do with the fact that these older disks were considerably less dense in the first place, making them more resistant to the vagaries of time-based magnetic bit rot than newer more dense media.

Here is a rundown of what I found - this will no doubt be handy to anyone with the same problem:

http://webstore.kryoflux.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=1&products_id=30
http://store.go4retro.com/zoomfloppy/
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2503
http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html

USB doesn't supply enough power to run a 5.25" drive, but this might help, though it might be easier just to find an ancient functioning 286 and do it that way.

http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html

USB 5.25 Floppy controller. I'm not affiliated with them in any way, it's just the first Google hit I followed.

But more to the point, the USB standard is used for a great many things while the 5.25 Floppy was a one-off. That makes it a lot more likely to hang around, even if it comes to be seen as a cheap phone charger/keyboard interface.

You could go with a USB floppy controller. http://shop.deviceside.com/prod/FC5025

Some guy up there gave this link to some people that sell a 5.25 to usb interface card:

http://www.deviceside.com/

I don't know about sending you back a USB flash drive but Floppydisk.com offers a service to transfer the contents of floppy disks to CD (see here). Unfortunately the procedure is expensive, prohibitively so in my opinion ($55 USD for the recovery of 10 floppy disks). Luckily there is a more affordable alternative. The FC5025 is a device that adapts a standard 5.25" floppy disk drive mechanism to USB and comes with software for Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux. It costs $55.25 USD. Given that you already have a 5.25" mechanism, which aren't easy to find these days, the FC5025 is an affordable solution to your problem.