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?

Comments

I've got one...

[JMZero]

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

"External" drive

[psergiu]

- 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.

Don't this sound familiar......

[Chanc_Gorkon]

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.

Have it hang out

[Chacham]

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.