Wang PC 350/16S floppy drives

[NT4boy]

Hi,

I want to make a backup of the hard drive so dragged the IDE drive into a USB caddy, but although the Connor drive type comes up, the disk is apparently not readable. Maybe to do with the fact its formatted in DOS 3.3?

Anyway, neither of the floppy drives work, so I replaced the 1.44 with a new one.
Problem with now is that the led light up all the time, and still cannot read anything.

In my memory, led on all the time means ribbon on backwards, but the connector has a key so you cannot get it wrong. Any one any good ideas on getting the software off this old drive or making the floppy work?

 

[Chuck(G)]

Branding of the old floppy drive might help, but I suspect that it's still something funny with the cable.

Many IDE-USB converters do not work with old IDE drives--I think they may rely on LBA addressing, which not a lot of old drives have. Grab an older PC with an IDE interface and boot it into DOS.

 

[NT4boy]

Thanks,
I bit the bullet and machined off the connector key so it would fit into the new floppy drive the otherway up, and magically, I have a working drive. The old un was a Mitsubishi, but evidently not to the 'current standard' when it came to the connector. I tried quite hard to resurrect it, but 5 years in a foundry was evidently too much, everything seemed to mechanically move when expected, but no data read.

With the wonders of a DOS 6.22 BOOT floppy, and a parallel port ZIP drive, have copied the whole disk. In fact using PKZIP, got the complete file structure on a 1.44 floppy!