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Modern PC to 5.25 floppy- options?

T

Tupin

Experienced Member
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Jun 7, 2009
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436
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St. Louis, MO
Okay, so with the computers from Commodore, Apple, and Atari, there are interfacing options that allow modern PCs to send data to older ones. Is there anything similar for a PC? I have a few 5.25 inch floppy drives and a Windows 98 PC with a drive that doesn't need to be in there, a CD-ROM drive when I already have a DVD drive in it. Could I take the CD-ROM drive out, put in a 5.25, then perform formats and transfer files?
 
The simple answer is "most likely", assuming this is a slightly older PC (which I'm guessing it is by the Win98 )

Things you'll need:
- Floppy controller (obviously, but new motherboards may not include one!)
- BIOS support for the 5.25" drive (again, some NEW motherboards are dropping anything but 1.44MB 3.5", if they support floppies at all)
- A floppy cable capable of attaching to the card edge (most common) of the 5.25" drive

Windows 98 will certainly support a 1.2MB or 360KB 5.25" floppy drive. And the power connector to the unnecessary CD-ROM should be the same 4-pin molex.

The last thing to note is that you CAN use 360KB disks in a 1.2MB drive, but this is generally not recommended because of the slight disparity in track spacing of the disk, I believe. Although I've never actually encountered any problem, I think it's a long term, many reuse sort of failure?
 
Yeah, I figured it should work, the only problem I have is that the CD-ROM drive does not have the right type of connector. I would need some sort of adapter. I'll check tomorrow.
 
Hi, yeah, should work is you mention that the machine runs Win98, it should be from the era where the floppy controller is indeed onboard.

On a side note, I have a Socket939 based machine (my main pc) and the machine is running Windows 7, and I am able to run a 1.2MB 5.25" drive in the machine to great effect! In this motherboard's case, to does support all the way from 360KB to 2.88MB so that does help I reckon.
Cheers!
 
Tupin said:
Yeah, I figured it should work, the only problem I have is that the CD-ROM drive does not have the right type of connector. I would need some sort of adapter.
Click to expand...
What is the adapter for? I fear there is something you misunderstood. The CD-ROM likely has an IDE interface and that is not at all like a floppy and no physical adaptor will fix that. Like southbird said, (perhaps reread his post) the floppy drive will likely have an edge connector, but the cable is not the real problem here. You need a floppy controller, either built into the MB or on a separate card.
 
Well, there is one floppy controller built into the motherboard, but the 3.5 inch drive is currently using it. I tried connecting a 5.25 drive with a cable from a Tandy 1000, and it fit directly into the motherboard where the 3.5 inch drive would normally go. I guess what I need is a 16 bit ISA floppy controller for the 5.25 drive?
 
You can hook up 2 floppies to most MB-floppy controllers. Just buy a cable that has 3 3.5-style and 3 card edge-style connectors.
 
That appears to be one. For a clear image, they're usually called "universal" floppy cables. But anyway... you should ALSO make sure that your BIOS has two floppy drives to set. Most likely if it's backwards to 5.25" drives, it handles the dual setup too, but I can't account for every OEM ever.
 
southbird said:
The last thing to note is that you CAN use 360KB disks in a 1.2MB drive, but this is generally not recommended because of the slight disparity in track spacing of the disk, I believe. Although I've never actually encountered any problem, I think it's a long term, many reuse sort of failure?
Click to expand...

What happens is called the "tunnel erase" problem. I can't remember what goes wrong, but the way to keep it from happening is to never write data or programs to the same disk with different size drives. You can write something in a 1.2 meg drive and read it with a 360K drive, but don't then write info to that same disk with the 360K drive, or you will loose data. Same thing the other way around.

Sean
 
On a completely modern PC (no floppy header) I use Parallels VM (with the only real parallel port passthrough I've found - ironic due to the name of the VM) and DOS to run a Microsolutions Backpack drive, which I can then read files from or write to and transfer between the VM and the real OS running on the machine.
 
What I'd love to see is a PC equivalent of the Apple II program called ADTPro. It allows you to connect an Apple II with a serial card to a modern system via null modem cable, then (a) copy a disk image file to a real disk on the Apple, or (b) copy a real disk on the Apple to a disk image on the modern PC.

I've got an IBM Portable 5155 with no hard drive. I'd love to move 360K disk images to/from modern machines. I've never seen any way to do this - I've only found solutions for moving files. Is there something I don't know about? If there's nothing to do this, guess I might put it on my list of software to write (eventually?).

- Earl
 
retrobits said:
I've got an IBM Portable 5155 with no hard drive. I'd love to move 360K disk images to/from modern machines. I've never seen any way to do this - I've only found solutions for moving files. Is there something I don't know about? If there's nothing to do this, guess I might put it on my list of software to write (eventually?)l
Click to expand...

Wouldn't it be easier to put a hard drive in your 5155? Hargle's selling the 8-bit IDE kits. If you used a CF-to-IDE adapter, you could simply unplug the CF card and move it to your modern PC, no cables needed.
 
Floppies_only said:
What happens is called the "tunnel erase" problem. I can't remember what goes wrong, but the way to keep it from happening is to never write data or programs to the same disk with different size drives.
Click to expand...

As I recall, the problem was that a 1.2MB drive wrote a slightly smaller-sized sector than a 360K drive (physically). So when you wrote to a disk with both types of drive, you caused confusion. Data could bleed onto adjacent sectors, or fail to overwrite the old data completely.

This was why pre-1987 ATs typically came equipped with a 1.2MB drive as A: and a 360K drive as B:, so AT users could safely swap disks with PC and XT users.
 
Dave Farquhar said:
As I recall, the problem was that a 1.2MB drive wrote a slightly smaller-sized sector than a 360K drive (physically). So when you wrote to a disk with both types of drive, you caused confusion. Data could bleed onto adjacent sectors, or fail to overwrite the old data completely.

This was why pre-1987 ATs typically came equipped with a 1.2MB drive as A: and a 360K drive as B:, so AT users could safely swap disks with PC and XT users.
Click to expand...

Another way was to degauss the media and format and write on a 96 tpi 1.2M drive. Absolutely reliable--the disk can be read on both 1.2MB and 360K drives. The problem for most people was finding a degausser strong enough to do the job. A VHS tape bulk eraser works fine.
 
retrobits said:
What I'd love to see is a PC equivalent of the Apple II program called ADTPro. It allows you to connect an Apple II with a serial card to a modern system via null modem cable, then (a) copy a disk image file to a real disk on the Apple, or (b) copy a real disk on the Apple to a disk image on the modern PC.

I've got an IBM Portable 5155 with no hard drive. I'd love to move 360K disk images to/from modern machines. I've never seen any way to do this - I've only found solutions for moving files. Is there something I don't know about? If there's nothing to do this, guess I might put it on my list of software to write (eventually?).

- Earl
Click to expand...
Umm, isn't a disk image a file? I haven't looked at them all, but I'd expect that there is an imaging program out there that either creates a self-extracting image no larger than the imaged disk, or compresses the image so that the image and the extractor fit on a disk; might be worth looking around.
 
MikeS said:
Umm, isn't a disk image a file? I haven't looked at them all, but I'd expect that there is an imaging program out there that either creates a self-extracting image no larger than the imaged disk, or compresses the image so that the image and the extractor fit on a disk; might be worth looking around.
Click to expand...

Mike, I think retrobits problem is that he has nowhere to put the image file on his hard-disk-less 5155. Maybe what we really need is a "bargain basement" hard disk for 8-bit ISA system. Say, an SD card on a board with BIOS that just plugs in. Your basic 21st century hardcard.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Another way was to degauss the media and format and write on a 96 tpi 1.2M drive. Absolutely reliable--the disk can be read on both 1.2MB and 360K drives. The problem for most people was finding a degausser strong enough to do the job. A VHS tape bulk eraser works fine.
Click to expand...
Indeed, but worth noting that you should use DD diskettes.

Although there's a little more to it than just the track width/tunnel erase issue (not really sector size), FloppiesOnly has the right idea: Start with blank (bulk-erased if necessary) DD disks, format them on whichever drive(s) you plan to write them with, mark them appropriately and never write to them with a different drive type than the one you formatted them with; you should not have any problems reading with either drive type.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Mike, I think retrobits problem is that he has nowhere to put the image file on his hard-disk-less 5155. Maybe what we really need is a "bargain basement" hard disk for 8-bit ISA system. Say, an SD card on a board with BIOS that just plugs in. Your basic 21st century hardcard.
Click to expand...
I assumed he had two floppy drives; only one drive would indeed be somewhat limiting...;-)

But yes, a simple NVRAM/flash card would solve a few problems; it'd be convenient, but you wouldn't even necessarily need a BIOS if you put the driver(s) on the floppy, would you? But isn't that what the XT-IDE card does, albeit with flash instead of SD?
 
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