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External 5.25" Floppy Drives?

Posted by Cliff on from the nostalgic-for-old-media dept.

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?

4 of 52 comments (clear)

  1. I did the same thing... by ConceptJunkie · · Score: 3, Interesting
    ...a few years back. I just stuck an old 5.25" drive in my machine and tried to do it all at once over a few weeks. I never did quite finish and now I'm in the same boat as you. However, I do have some old PC's sitting around.

    I pulled a working 386 out of the trash at work about a year ago. I'm thinking I could use the floppy drive on there and dump everything to the 100-some-old MB IDE harddrive and just plug that in to my regular machine to copy them all off... or pop an old network card into it, but that's probably too much work. I've also got pcAnywhere and that funky yellow parallel cable that came with it.

    The advantage I have is that I have quite a bit of old hardware sitting around. If you can't find a new drive, go to a computer consignment shop and pick one up. Or possibly even get an old '386 machine (or so) for less than $100 bucks.

    I don't know what the current availability of 5-1/4" drives is, but it's not too hard to get ahold of old computers these days. It seems almost everyone's got an old clunker in the closet or basement that you could borrow.

    Good luck!

    --
    You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
  2. USB 3.5 external floppy conversion by Ledge · · Score: 3, Interesting

    With a 5.25 floppy drive, this, a screwdriver, and some duct tape to make the resulting product more attractive, you could have one. If you happened to have one of those old IBM floppy drives that were both a 5.25 and a 3.5 in one, you'd have something worth keeping.

    --
    If it ain't a Model M, it's a piece of crap.
  3. Don't this sound familiar...... by Chanc_Gorkon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    We still have several control units on the mainframe that read their microcode off of a 5.25" disk that's held in each unit. I remember not too long ago we ran around the campus like mad trying to find a PC with a drive in it because we thought we had a bad microcode disk. Turns out, we didn't but we even resorted to "trying" to boot a old IBM PC (NO stinking AT in back of it....this was an original 8086 based PC). Needless to say, that OLD machine would not even power up. What are we still doing with that OLD machine? It's in our Network/PC Services Manager's office in his museum consisting of that PC, a old IBM proprinter and I even think the ex director of the Data Center gave him a piece of original magnetic core memory from our first IBM 360 mainframe! Pretty amazing eh?

    To anwer your question, I think it would be best to setup a direct cable connect with an older machine to do this. Do newer ATX boards even support 5.25" floppy drives?? This way you can setup a script or something to read all of the disks (2 or more if you have that many drives) onto the hard drive then send em over to the newer machine with the CDR. I have a similar issue in that I got some disks I used when I built my 8085A trainer. It has all of the ROM code on them as well as my Senior Project code (although that code would be useless since I don't even have the hardware for the project anymore...I still have the 8085A). These disks were written on a HP 9000 system and I don't even think a PC could read them. Oh well. I don't intend on blitzing the code in the rom and I think if I ask, I could get access to their new rom burning stuff they have now (I bet it's on normal PC's now....). It would be nice to build a little rom burner for my PC and use the ole 8085A to control a Christmas Light display.

    --

    Gorkman

  4. 5.25" seems more durable than 3.5" by DivideByZero · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I was rummaging through a fistfull of disks, and I found that my 5.25" disks from several years earlier were in generally better shape than 3.5" disks that were newer. DD disks tend to last longer than HD disks, of course, because the spread isen't as bad.

    YMMV. IANAMF (I am not a Magnetic Field)