• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Floppy disk drives

bettablue

Veteran Member
Joined
Feb 21, 2011
Messages
1,647
Location
Eugene, OR
Hi again all!

I first want to thank oll of you for being so helpful and up front with me regarding my purchase of my "new" IBM5150. I am definitely thankful for all of the advice and assistance you have all given.

Now, onto the reason I'm here today. I want to buy and install a 4 1/4" floppy disk drive into my current PC to create and write disk images. First, though. I forgot whare I read that the 5150 uses a 360 Kb floppy Disk. What is the disk designation for the IBM? Is is Dual Side, Single Density, Double Density or what? secondly, if I can find a drive for my Windoes 7 computer, (I do have a floppy drive header on my mobo) How do I configure it to write the floppy in the correct format? Is there anything else I need to worry about? Can I also use the same drive to write diskettes for my Apple lle?

Thanks for reading.
 
The IBM 5150 and 5160 came with 360kb 5 1/4" disk that are DSDD disks. I actually installed a 1.44mb 3.5" drive into my 5160, this made data transfers so much easier and I still have a HH 360k drive in it as well in case I want to use any of the software I have on 5 1/4" disks.

That being said Windows 7 may or may not support 360kb drives fully, and your motherboard may not either.

My solution is to have an old Windows 98 box with a 360kb disk drive in it, then I use the Windows file sharing to share the 360kb drive. This enables me to copy files to it directly from my Win7 box. If I need to write out an image I copy the img file to the 98 machine then use Winimage on it to write out the image. I also have a 1.2Mb 5 1/4" (DSHD) drive in the 98 box as well shared the same way. Lastly if I need to make 1.44mb disks I use a Sony USB drive connected to my Win7 machine.

Works perfectly, and avoids a ton of legacy support issues that may arise with Windows 7 and newer hardware.
 
All good info. I do have to wonder though if Windows 7 XP mode will be of assistance here too. My current computer was built on a Gigagbyte u43L motherboard with legacy suuport for older drives. It actually has bith SATA and IDE conectors; although I am currently not using any of the EDI slots. There are also two floppy disk headers, one for 1.4Med drives and the other is supposed to be for older floppy disks.

I do have one more option, but I need to do some more research to see how it works. In most cases, I think this will also be a better solution too simply because once everything is set up, there will be a direct connection to the files I have on my local "D" drive. I'm talking over 3500 games and productivity titles here specifically written to work on less than 640Kb of RAM on the 5150 and 5160 computers. I CAN connect my 5150 directly to my current PC using serial ports and a null modem cable. I have to purchase serial ports for both my current PC and the 5150. Simple. I found them both on Amazon.com, which surprised me. They have the null cable too. And that is only something like 2 or 3 bucks for a 10 foot cable. Supposedly, I can use a Laplink 3 to load a disk image directly from my PC to the 5150. I don't know how to transfer the files over yet though. The part I really need to find out is how to do the actual transfer to the 5150 and then write the floppy. Is this setup very complicated? And more importantly, how does working with an image differ from a simple file transfer to the 5150? I've read some of the guides on the Internet and on these forums, but I seem to get lost during the process. I guess what I really need is a simple step by step, 1, 2, 3 guide to transferring files and images to the 5150. Then, using the 5150, I can write to the floppy.

Is there a better option than Laplink 3? And too, is there a better way without having to get another computer. I just don't have the space for another system in my place.

The IBM 5150 and 5160 came with 360kb 5 1/4" disk that are DSDD disks. I actually installed a 1.44mb 3.5" drive into my 5160, this made data transfers so much easier and I still have a HH 360k drive in it as well in case I want to use any of the software I have on 5 1/4" disks.

That being said Windows 7 may or may not support 360kb drives fully, and your motherboard may not either.

My solution is to have an old Windows 98 box with a 360kb disk drive in it, then I use the Windows file sharing to share the 360kb drive. This enables me to copy files to it directly from my Win7 box. If I need to write out an image I copy the img file to the 98 machine then use Winimage on it to write out the image. I also have a 1.2Mb 5 1/4" (DSHD) drive in the 98 box as well shared the same way. Lastly if I need to make 1.44mb disks I use a Sony USB drive connected to my Win7 machine.

Works perfectly, and avoids a ton of legacy support issues that may arise with Windows 7 and newer hardware.
 
You definitely want a 360k drive. You will be able to read and write disks for the 5150 just fine. You cannot write disks for the Apple II though - Apple II disks use GCR encoding, and the PC floppy controller won't work with them at all. For the Apple II, you simply connect the II to the PC through the serial port and use ADTPro to transfer the disk images, and write them on the Apple's floppy drive.

I have no idea what Windows 7 supports, but first check to be sure your computer's BIOS allows you to set the floppy disk mode to 360kb. Some newer ones are lacking here. Go into the BIOS and page through the floppy disk drive type selector, you're looking for "5 1/4" 360kb" or something like that. If your BIOS supports it, then it hardly matters if Windows supports it or not, since you can always boot from a CD and use another OS (Linux, for example, has no problem with 360k floppy drives).

-Ian
 
Also to mention that the correct disks themselves will be needed - DSHD 5.25" disks will not work as the magnetic surface is too different (unlike 3.5" HD disks for DD use, as the surface is "close enough", usually anyway). Someone posted a good article on here a while ago with the details.

I was under the impression that DD disks were read-only in Win7, but I can't find the TechNet ref now.
 
Seems 360K *drives* haven't been supported by Windows since certainly 2000 and possibly NT4,

"Mostly, Windows NT+ hates 360K 5.25' drives because they lack a "disk changed" line and it's difficult for Windows to determine when a floppy's been changed--and mistakes can be disastrous. It's not that it can't be done, but the Great Minds at Microsoft determined that it wasn't worth implementing."

(source: http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/archive/index.php/t-21684.html)

360K *disks* might work in a 1.2MB drive, although chances are Windows won't format them that way either.
 
This thread is turning out to be one of the best for gathering information. One nice thing about this group is that I have never been given bad avice. I wonder about something though. I do have alaptop that is currently running Windows XP. It originally ran on Windows 98SE. There was a post, or ad for an external 5 1/4" floppy drive enclosure. I can't remember where I saw it though. If I were to find one, do you think I could install a 360Kb floppy drive and connect it to a USB? So far it seems that the only way to really get things moved over is to connect the 5150 directly to my primary computer. Am I correct?

In fact I just found this on E-Bay!

http://cgi.ebay.com/IBM-4869-001-36...010?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item5addc0dd92

It is a 5 1/4 360Kb external floppy drive. It look like it connects through a floppy disc controller card on a vintage system though. So sadly, I believe it would be useless to me.
 
Last edited:
I just posted the response below as your's came in. I am running into a lot more questions now than answers, but still this is becomming very usefull for me. Does anyone know where I can get a plain jane 360Kb floppy drive? I am now really thinking about putting one into an external floppy enclosure, if I can find one. That should negate a lot of the issues we're talking about, even if I have to connect it to a parallel or serial port.

Seems 360K *drives* haven't been supported by Windows since certainly 2000 and possibly NT4,

"Mostly, Windows NT+ hates 360K 5.25' drives because they lack a "disk changed" line and it's difficult for Windows to determine when a floppy's been changed--and mistakes can be disastrous. It's not that it can't be done, but the Great Minds at Microsoft determined that it wasn't worth implementing."

(source: http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/archive/index.php/t-21684.html)

360K *disks* might work in a 1.2MB drive, although chances are Windows won't format them that way either.
 
I am now really thinking about putting one into an external floppy enclosure, if I can find one. That should negate a lot of the issues we're talking about, even if I have to connect it to a parallel or serial port.

Floppy disk drives need to be connected to a floppy disk controller. Period. External floppy enclosures have a 37 pin cable that connects the drive to a floppy controller with an external port.

There are some kludges ("backpack" drives) that plugged into the parallel port, but those require DOS drivers, and never really worked well, even back then. Also, I doubt any of them would work with 360k drives.

There are also various projects attempting to connect floppy drives to USB. These are also not what you want, as so far none of them support writing to the disk. They're read only.

You need to check to see if your desktop PC's BIOS supports a 360k drive, and if so, attach a 360k floppy drive to it. Again, don't worry if Windoze supports the drive or not. You can always boot into another OS from CD or floppy and write the disks that way.

-Ian
 
I just posted the response below as your's came in. I am running into a lot more questions now than answers, but still this is becomming very usefull for me. Does anyone know where I can get a plain jane 360Kb floppy drive? I am now really thinking about putting one into an external floppy enclosure, if I can find one. That should negate a lot of the issues we're talking about, even if I have to connect it to a parallel or serial port.

I have a 1.2mb 5.25 floppy in an XP box, and while you cannot format 360k from the gui, you can format 360k disks from the command prompt.

FYI I have toyed with the idea of an external floppy, sadly there is no real way to do this with a 5.25" drive and get the results you want, USB Floppy enclosures I have researched only support 3.5" formats (2.88/1.44/720k) the controllers are lacking all logic to read/write any 5.25 formats. There may be vintage parallel port 5.25" drives out there, but those are getting hard to find these days, and as far as I know no one ever made any kind of serial floppy for PC. There is this for hooking a 5.25" up to USB, BUT its READ only, no write, and the software is pretty basic at this point, it looks like its got LOTS of potential if it could only write disks, because it can read just about any 5.25 format known to man or machine, lol.
 
I see what you mean. While looking at a few sites, I found absolutely nothing on using an old 360Kb floppy drive in a newer PC. At this point, I will definitely start putting together the parts I need to connect the 5150 to my main PC. This seem like the best method. Then too, with Lapink, I can load whatever software I want from the PC to the 5150 directly. I'll still want to use the drives on the 5150 to write new disks for some of the software I have in my collection.

Thanks again.
 
While looking at a few sites, I found absolutely nothing on using an old 360Kb floppy drive in a newer PC.

If your motherboard has a floppy controller, then you should definitely be able to connect it. Just check to see if the BIOS supports it. I've got a 360k drive on a fairly recent Athlon system and it works fine.

There's nothing "magic" about it. If the BIOS supports it, it'll work.

-Ian
 
At this point, I will definitely start putting together the parts I need to connect the 5150 to my main PC. This seem like the best method. Then too, with Lapink, I can load whatever software I want from the PC to the 5150 directly.

If you have parallel ports on both computers, the parallel cable for Laplink is a lot faster than the serial cable.
 
I have a an old 166MHz Pentium PC that is a Baby AT format. I have it set up to multiboot PC-DOS 7 (IBM), Win98, and Win2K. It has a 3 1/2" and a 360k 5 1/4" drives. I use this for move data back & forth. The Win2K OS sees the DOS FAT partition so it's easy to move files from the internet to the DOS world. It has an old 48xCD-ROM driver (read only) that I also use to move files to the DOS world.


If you look around you can find one for free. A little work will get it running again. Do not put no more that 512MB RAM in it. 256MB will work great. I use IE 6 with Win98 & Win2K and it does the job. I have it on a KVM switch with my main XP computer and when I need old school I have it at hand.
 
Just a thought here, but Windows XP, Vista and 7 have terrible serial and parallel support. Laplink may not work from within Windows, so you will need to run it in real mode with a DOS boot disk, which would mean you lose the NTFS support and won't be able to see any of your data.

I use Norton Commander to copy files with a parallel cable, and this method simply will not work from inside Windows 7 or Vista, and only seems to work sometimes in XP.

I have been through what the OP is going through, and in the end the Windows 98 box as a "tweener" machine works out the best for me.

Even if you found an external 5.25" drive I doubt it would work any better than using an internal drive under windows 7. MS has mostly glazed over legacy support and there are plenty of people who run really old serial equiptment that have run into this.

There's nothing "magic" about it. If the BIOS supports it, it'll work.

Are you running Windows 7 on the machine you mentioned? Because I can tell you my BIOS supports 360k disks, but Windows 7 (64 bit) does not like them at all.
 
Just a thought here, but Windows XP, Vista and 7 have terrible serial and parallel support. Laplink may not work from within Windows, so you will need to run it in real mode with a DOS boot disk, which would mean you lose the NTFS support and won't be able to see any of your data.
It turns out that in modern Windows, Laplink can be run in a DOSBox virtual machine.
A procedure for that is at http://members.dodo.com.au/~slappanel555/transfer/transfer.htm
 
DOSbox will be no problem I already have windows XP running under virual machine right now too. So adding DOSbox should be fairly easy. Here's another thought. Has anyone ever ran DOS from a thumb drive? Can serial support be added on that as well?

It turns out that in modern Windows, Laplink can be run in a DOSBox virtual machine.
A procedure for that is at http://members.dodo.com.au/~slappanel555/transfer/transfer.htm
 
Are you running Windows 7 on the machine you mentioned? Because I can tell you my BIOS supports 360k disks, but Windows 7 (64 bit) does not like them at all.

No. I run Linux.

But, even if you're running Windows 7, you can *boot off other media* into another OS. You can run Linux from a CD, or even Windows XP. You can boot DOS from floppy or CD. I've seen Windows 98 run from a Zip disk - it probably wouldn't be beyond the realm of possibility to have it running from a flash drive.

-Ian
 
Back
Top