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Retrieving data from Tandy 1000 floppies

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melkor

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I have a Tandy 1000 computer (plain 1000, with two 5.25" floppy drives) that I would like to get up and running again. As part of this, I would like to make sure that I can back up and re-create a number of 5.25" floppies that I used to use with the computer. However, so far, the only way I can see to get data off the 5.25" floppies is to get a 5.25" -> USB controller (http://www.deviceside.com/) and a 5.25" floppy drive, but this is a read-only solution as far as I can tell. Another solution would be to somehow connect a 3.5" floppy drive to the Tandy 1000 and to use the Tandy to transfer data between the two. Is this possible? If so, how can I go about doing this?

Thanks in advance for any help/advice!
 
I would recommend finding something, like a Pentium III or so with support for 5.25" drives and use a program such as WinImage to make disk backups and to write disks.

Oh, and this should be posted in the "Tandy/Radio Shack" area, not the PCs and Clones, even though it is a clone basically.
 
I have a 3.5" floppy and a 5.25" in both my Model 1000a and 1000sx. Hooking up is simple. Get a 3.5" 1.44 MB floppy drive and connect as the B: drive (most modern 3.5 inch drives are already set this way). May need a 3.5 to 5.25 floppy edge adpater to get it working and a 3.5 to 5.25 frame. (see pics) May also need power cable adpater as well. But be advised that this solution is only good up to 720k formated on the 3.5. May also need to ad a line to CONFIG.SYS file such as DRIVPARM=/d:2 /f:2 to get the 3.5 to format 720k. I hope this isn't too confusing. Any more help needed let us know.

Oh if anyone says a 1.44 drive won't work you need a 720k is nonsense they work great at 720k!
 

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Chromedome45 said:
I have a 3.5" floppy and a 5.25" in both my Model 1000a and 1000sx. Hooking up is simple. Get a 3.5" 1.44 MB floppy drive and connect as the B: drive (most modern 3.5 inch drives are already set this way). May need a 3.5 to 5.25 floppy edge adpater to get it working and a 3.5 to 5.25 frame. (see pics) May also need power cable adpater as well. But be advised that this solution is only good up to 720k formated on the 3.5. May also need to ad a line to CONFIG.SYS file such as DRIVPARM=/d:2 /f:2 to get the 3.5 to format 720k. I hope this isn't too confusing. Any more help needed let us know.

Oh if anyone says a 1.44 drive won't work you need a 720k is nonsense they work great at 720k!
Click to expand...

A couple of things :

There are reports that the most recently manufactured 1.44MB drives do not work as 720KB drives, but it is unlikely you will find such a drive. You may or may not be able to read or write reliably with HD formatted media.

Modern 3.5 floppy drives are intended to be used as drive A:, but that is because the manufacturer assumed the drive would be used in a system with a twisted cable. Tandy 1000s do not use twisted cables, so it will always look to the machine as drive B:. However, if you want to boot off that drive, you will need to find a way to change DS1 to DS0, which may require soldering.

DRIVPARM will not work with Tandy DOS 2.11, which is what the OP may have. He will need Tandy, IBM or some other DOS 3.2 or higher.

Is that pin to edge adapter homemade?
 
I usually stick with some slightly (more than a few) years old Alps drives. They have a solder pad where you can assign drive A: or B:. You are right GH about Dos 2.11. He will need to get 3.2 or later for DRIVPARM. As for the edge adpater I found it along with about 2 others which are in my 2 Tandy 1000's at the moment.
 
One option I've been standardizing on is to put 8-bit-compatible network cards in my vintage machines; that way, using Mike Brutman's MTCP package and a packet driver, I can just FTP files on/off the machine. No 3.5" drives needed.

Before I did that, I kept a computer with both a 1.44MB 3.5" drive and a 360K 5.25" drive set up alongside my other one, and I would put several 360K images onto a 3.5" disk and use that computer to write out 360K images.

Before that, I used a serial (and at times parallel) cable along with FastLynx (precursor to INTERLNK) to transfer files/images.

All of these methods work best if you have a third location to write files to. You mentioned your machine is a dual-drive system, so I'm assuming it doesn't have a hard drive. Hopefully it has 640K RAM though, and if you need to write out 360K worth of info (like a bootable disk image), I would suggest creating a boot disk that sets up a RAM disk of about 400K so that you can dump files into it, which then get written properly to a drive.
 
Trixter said:
Before I did that, I kept a computer with both a 1.44MB 3.5" drive and a 360K 5.25" drive set up alongside my other one, and I would put several 360K images onto a 3.5" disk and use that computer to write out 360K images.
Click to expand...

This is my solution to this kind of problem. I have a PIII machine running Windows 98SE decked out with 360K 5.25 inch and 1.44MB 3.5 inch drives. I use it specifically for imaging.

Tez
 
tezza said:
This is my solution to this kind of problem. I have a PIII machine running Windows 98SE decked out with 360K 5.25 inch and 1.44MB 3.5 inch drives. I use it specifically for imaging.
Click to expand...
Ditto Ditto, I tossed together a K6/2-450 for the same reason a few weeks ago. Just modern enough I can read/write to a share on it from my win7 box, just old enough it can handle pretty much any format floppy.

I'm playing with adding another drive controller I have to it; lets me disable it's IDE and set up floppy as secondary, that way I can run both 1.2mb and 360k 5.25" while keeping that third floppy in there as 5.25"... as I do have the need to write to both types of five and a quarter.
 
As a side topic to your thread, I'd also like to know the contents of these floppies you are trying to read. If there's games on them, we want to make sure that whatever images you create also get made available to certain archival types (ie, ME) so that no data is lost to the wind.
 
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