Slashdot Mirror
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?
I've got an external "386" device (I paid like 1000 dollars for it) that I'd sell. It connects via the parallel port, or ethernet with the right drivers. As a bonus, it has 40 MEGABYTES of its own "hard disk" space and is a combo 3 1/2, 5 1/4, CD Drive.
-Dave
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
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.
- Get an internal 5" drive
- get a really long floppy cable (up to 0.75m is ok) (ar extend/build one yourself - 34 wires)
- get 2 molex power connectors (one male on female) and 4 wires and build an "power extender"
- remove an ISA/PCI cover plate
- pull the floppy and power cable trough there
- connect to the drive outside the case
- use duct dape as you see fit.
- do not use near strong EM fields.
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
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.
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
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.
-
Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
If its only a temporary solution you seek,
there is no reason for it to be sleek.
Just open the case, put the drive on the floor,
and close it all up when you need it no more.
Have you read my journal today?
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.
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)
but that doesn't answer the question. He is looking for an external drive, those are internal drives.
-- free as in swatantryam - not soujanyam.
For God's sake, USE IT!
Google is your friend.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Problems with your 5 1/4" floppy? These guys can help you out!
"Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love." -Turkish Proverb
FLAME BAIT
I have to say this, has the viewing audience of Slashdot gone so mainstream that it is to this level where "Ask Slashdot" posts are about very very basic hardware and software questions? Whats next? "Where is the Any key" Or "I don't have any memory left in my computer"? "How do I delete files"? "Why does my Windows keep crashing?". FLAME BAIT
No, though I suppose it has gotten so "mainstream" that you can't be bothered to read the fucking question. To wit, he writes:
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.
To which you respond:
Get a dual 3.5/5.25 unit
Amazing. Not even an article to link to, the whole thing is right here, and yet you _still_ manage to both not read it properly and then bitch about how stupid people are becoming here on Slashdot.
Hey, have you met my good friend the kettle? Y'all the same color, you see.
--saint