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External 5.25" Floppy Drives?
R2.0 writes "Are there any external 5.25" FD's out there? My wife
and I have a number of old 5.25" floppies with all sorts of
interesting stuff from school - she had a Kaypro, and Lehigh had just
gotten hundreds of Zenith PC's. In the interest of archival record
keeping (Ok, I'm a packrat), I'd like to get this stuff off the old
floppies and onto my HD, and then maybe onto CD-R. Problem: I'm out
of 5.25" bays in my Dell, so I can't just put in one of those handy
combo 3.5"/5.25" drives. And I can't just pop the CD player out,
pop in an old drive, and do everything in one batch - I need to be
able to do this a couple of disks at a time, between changing
diapers, etc. Can anyone suggest an external solution to my
problem? Parallel, serial, or USB; homebrewed or purchased." Ah,
the endless problem of preserving data from old media. Due to the lack
of use that 5.25" drives have had in the past 10 years, this might be
a very hard-to-find item. Is anyone making 5.25" drives anymore?
There are good chances your data has been corrupted and your quest is merelly a waste of time. Magnetic media will only last a few years. There's no way to tell the exact life expectancy of the media, as it depends, among others, on the conditions if was stored. Here's how to store. Temperature should be below 70F and humidity below 70% if you wanted to preserve data for a long time. According to this, the floppy disks should last from 5 to 10 years.
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Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
First, get a powered 5.25 drive box. So many of these were used for external SCSI CDROM drives, that they can be had for almost nothing. A quick ebay search turned up this beut, which you can "buy now" for $15.00
Acquire your floppy drive. Once again, ebay makes this easy.
Remove the CDROM drive and rear SCSI centronics connector from the drive box. Mount the floppy drive in place of the CDROM. Discard CDROM.
Remove slot cover from PC. Run floppy data cable out the gaping hole and through the gaping hole in the back of the drivebox.
Done
Almost all 5.25" drives use a card-edge connector. No floppy cables seem to have these anymore. The easiest way to get the adapter is usually to buy a 3.5" floppy drive "mounting kit" most of which still include the little adapter.
You will probably have cable-length issues if you want to leave your internal floppy connected at the same time. You can solve this by having a custom cable made, finding an extension cable, or buying a 5.25"/3.5" combo drive (once again, ebay has several) and just leaving the internal drive disconnected (or remove it) for now. Most of the combo drives take an IDC header (as opposed to card-edge), so you won't have to find an adapter or old floppy cable, either.
This entire adventure will end up costing you roughly $30 and some time. If you are competent with a screwdriver, I would estimate 60 minutes from start to finish once you have all the pieces.
Have fun.
but that doesn't answer the question. He is looking for an external drive, those are internal drives.
-- free as in swatantryam - not soujanyam.
The biggest problem you might have is that a lot of 5.25" drives either are fixed as the first floppy drive, or have jumper settings that are long-lost. So you hook up your 5.25" as the first floppy and 3.5" as the second, and then swap them in the BIOS.
Incidentally, I recently built a 1.2 GHz Athlon box with a 5.25" drive by special request of the customer. It does work, and yes, even Windows 98 and 2000 support it. (Dunno about XP, but I'd presume so since it works with Windows 2000.)
(This is a little OT, since the orignal poster asked about external drives, but he can always do this and just sit the drive outside of the case somewhere, assuming this isn't supposed to be a permanent solution. Or he could just buy a bigger case.)