5.25 floppy discs~

[Normy]

DOES anyone on here have ANY idea how I download a bunch of term papers that I wrote back in 1988 from 5.25 "floppy's"?

I have several term papers from when I was in college, and I still have the 5.25 disk's that I saved them on.

Hmm-

That really brings up several good points: 1. How old is "old"? 2. So, does anyone have an old computer from 1989 that can handle the old 5.25 disks?

2. Are these disks even viable any more? I have tapes that I recorded from the stereo in 1981; WIOT in Toledo, a bunch of heavy metal. I can play them tonight and they sound great! But what about those term papers on disk that I saved in 1989?

3. I wrote several GREAT term papers! I was a different person then, non-political, and devoted to the turbocharged VW Scirocco that I drove. The car had the extremely-rare Legend FACTORY turbo; only 52 cars had this system, installed by the dealer. 128 hp, and 170 lb/ft in a 2200 pound chassis. Bottle rocket!

Maybe I wasn't so different afterall!

Anyway, I have all these 5.25 floppies laying around. What can be done with them? Does anyone know a company that can download them?

N

[GH85Carrera]

Wow, I have not seen a 5.25 inch floppy drive in a LONG time. Look for a local used computer store. They might be able to help you.

[Schumi]

5.25" floppies used, at least if I recall correctly, the same protocols and connections that the 3.5" floppies later used. So if you can find a modern computer with a 3.5 floppy (a lot of dells still have them) get that, open it up, disconnect the 3.5" drive cable and go get yourself a 5.25" drive from a old computer store or ebay. Hook it up sitting outside the computer, boot the computer, and see if it will recognize the drive.

Some newer motherboards might not recognize it, but there are tons of older generation (think pentium 3, Windows 98) computers at a yard sale near you that would support one of those drives.

[Hugh R]

Brings up an interesting point about archiving. You can't access 20 year old stuff, how about when it's 1,000 years old? Nothing like the written word. Also, I read a while ago that the National Archives are storing music and other spoken stuff on ....you guessed it VINYL! Yes, they're making LP records! Why you ask? What is more basic than vinyl and a needle. Sort of like my 100 year old Victrola that I can actually crank up and put on a platter. 10 years, 50 years or 1,000 years from now....just think about your iPod music being accessible.

[LakeCleElum]

I might had an old computer around with the 5.25 drive.....It has Windows 95, but still works..Lemme look around......

[RWebb]

buy a 5-1/4 drive and plug it into a drive bay next to the 3.5 drive - if the box runs 3.5's it will probably run the 5.25"

[EarlyPorsche]

The 3.5 and the 5.25 should use the same cable. The question will be drivers because old stuff wasn't plug and play like every USB thing is today. Worse yet it might have a 5.25 driver disk! HAHA

[Schumi]

to just read data, all floppy drivers are rather standard, as the BIOS has to be able to read data from disks to boot. So if you can interface it with the FDD cable on an older motherboard, it should show up in the BIOS boot screen as 720kb disk drive.

[GH85Carrera]

Long term storage of digital data is something that has not yet been worked out. We have a huge library of old aerial film. We can scan a piece of film from 1950 and put it back in the drawer. Keeping that scan for more than a few years get to be difficult and expensive.

[Schumi]

now my interest is peaked. i'm searching the internet to try and find someone who's interfaced a 5.25" floppy drive to USB.

I have an old drive somewhere... and I have some old disks somewhere too. It would be a cool nostalgia piece to have on my desk...

[svandamme]

eeer no , most 5.25 inch floppies used a flat connector rather then a AT pin style connector






Maybe if you are lucky , you could find a USB floppy drive, open it up, and find a 40 pin cable connector on the floppy, but i seriously doubt it, as most are made with laptop internals... eg flat pcb cables, not fat AT style cables......


And most bios'es on modern computers, won't know what to do with a 5.25...

Best bet is to find somebody who has some old pc that still sort of works, maybe a 386
hook up a 5.25 inch, try to copy the stuff to hard disk, then try to attach that harddisk to a modern computer ( perhaps via external USB hard drive enclosure)

[Schumi]

That's the best bet.


There were a very limited amount of external 5.25 drives made with parallel port instead of SCSI, with drivers for mac/pc. A USB-Parallel converter along with the correct driver could yield success.