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Old floppy in new computer

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rosaage

Experienced Member
Joined
Sep 12, 2014
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Norway, Rogaland
I want to add a native 5.25" floppy to my pc, but I can't find a way to connect it. I have a PCI slot and a PCi-e slot on my motherboard.
The only few methods I found of connecting one to a modern pc requires the use of special software. What I want is native support, meaning it shows up in my computer as a floppy disk.
Windows 8 64-Bit
 
rosaage said:
I want to add a native 5.25" floppy to my pc, but I can't find a way to connect it. I have a PCI slot and a PCi-e slot on my motherboard.
The only few methods I found of connecting one to a modern pc requires the use of special software. What I want is native support, meaning it shows up in my computer as a floppy disk.
Windows 8 64-Bit
Click to expand...

I'm assuming that there is either no floppy controller on your MB, or there is and it doesn't support 5.25" drives ......

I've been looking for a way to do this for years - as far as Ive been able to determine, it's NOT POSSIBLE - the hardware required simply doesn't exist - there's no such this as a USB 5.25" drive that appears in explorer. Deviceside and Kryoflux make USB floppy controllers, but they are designed for data retreival rather than general usage, and as you say have custom software.

I did however discover that a USB to ISA backplane device does exist. In theory you could connect one of these to a USB port and plug an ISA floppy controller into the ISA slot. That would give you the hardware - although I have no idea if Win8 would be able to make sense of it, and if it did, does Win8 support 5.25 anyway?

http://arstech.com/install/ecom-prodshow/usb2isar.html
 
Yeah, I've thought about that too but $149 is a bit too much for 5,25" drive support. I've watched a couple of yotube videos with 5,25" drives and windows 8 and they seem legit and working, So I guess as long as your mb has a controller with 5,25" support or the isa card it should work, But if the computer will pick up and work with the isa floppy controller is another thing.
 
rosaage said:
Yeah, I've thought about that too but $149 is a bit too much for 5,25" drive support. I've watched a couple of yotube videos with 5,25" drives and windows 8 and they seem legit and working, So I guess as long as your mb has a controller with 5,25" support or the isa card it should work, But if the computer will pick up and work with the isa floppy controller is another thing.
Click to expand...

It is a bit steep just to read those old floppies - but it comes down to how bad do you want it? Most of us are on this forum because we work with old hardware as a hobby - $149 beats spending $50000 on a classic car for instance ☺

Windows 8 won't have any problems with pre-existing disks - but it may have issues with formatting - definitely won't work from windows it will need a command prompt and the right switches on the command line.

I think I might try this just to see if it works!
 
Why not?

This is exactly a few of the members here have a "tweener" system though. Generally some generic system with a controller that is known to cope with earlier disks layouts.
 
And now you understand why I replaced my not-very-old motherboard with a nearly new one. Same CPU. The new one has both a floppy controller and an IDE header in it.

FWIW, there were few PCI floppy controllers made, but I've never run into any in the flesh.
 
I don't think Jens is supporting the CW cards; nor do I know if they're easy to find.

They're a very different animal--don't expect things to work as a native floppy controller would.
 
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