Need advice on how to recover 5.25" floppy
Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2019 2:21 pm
Hi, my question is not 100% related to kryoFlux, but it seems on this forum there are expert people that maybe can help me.
I have some old 5.25" 360K floppy disks that i'd like to recover (=transfer their content on a modern pc).
They were wrote with an 8088 pc running MS-DOS.
My "ideal" solution would be an external USB 5.25" drive, so i could use it like an external drive and read/write on it. The most important thing is the "reading" part, writing files would be a cool and interesting feature, but it's not so essential.
I did some researches and there are many 3.5" external floppy USB drives, but there aren't external 5.25" drives.
However i already have some hardware that may be useful:
- a 8088 pc with two 5.25" drives. At the beginning both drives were able to read and write, but now only one drive can write, the other one can only read (maybe something is broken/demages).
- an external C64 drive
I did some reaserches and I found 4 ways to access 5.25" floppy disks:
1) connect the C64 external floppy drive to the "modern" pc using a particoular self-made cable (don't remember if it used serial port or parallel port). I don't remember how the cable was made, and also i'm not sure that C64 drive can read MS-dos floppy.
2) use the FC5025 controller (read-only)
3) use the kryoFlux controller (if i understood correctly, kryoFlux is more used for data recovery on very demaged floppy)
4) directly connect the 5.25" internal drive (taken from the 8088 pc) to a motherboard with a floppy connector (example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHsf3qRVWVw)
Some years ago i tried the method 4 with a pentium3 motherboard with windows XP.
The system recognized the drive, and i was able to read the data from 5.25" floppy. But there were a serious bug: at a certain point, the drive started to overwrite disks with the content of a disk I inserted before!
I don't know if it was a problem of drivers, controllers, OS or other, but i need something more secure and reliable.
Now i have another old motehrboard (it supports pentium4 and some early core2 processors) with a floppy connector, but i don't know if it's a good idea tro try to use it, it may have the same bugs of the other motherboard.
What should I do?
I have some old 5.25" 360K floppy disks that i'd like to recover (=transfer their content on a modern pc).
They were wrote with an 8088 pc running MS-DOS.
My "ideal" solution would be an external USB 5.25" drive, so i could use it like an external drive and read/write on it. The most important thing is the "reading" part, writing files would be a cool and interesting feature, but it's not so essential.
I did some researches and there are many 3.5" external floppy USB drives, but there aren't external 5.25" drives.
However i already have some hardware that may be useful:
- a 8088 pc with two 5.25" drives. At the beginning both drives were able to read and write, but now only one drive can write, the other one can only read (maybe something is broken/demages).
- an external C64 drive
I did some reaserches and I found 4 ways to access 5.25" floppy disks:
1) connect the C64 external floppy drive to the "modern" pc using a particoular self-made cable (don't remember if it used serial port or parallel port). I don't remember how the cable was made, and also i'm not sure that C64 drive can read MS-dos floppy.
2) use the FC5025 controller (read-only)
3) use the kryoFlux controller (if i understood correctly, kryoFlux is more used for data recovery on very demaged floppy)
4) directly connect the 5.25" internal drive (taken from the 8088 pc) to a motherboard with a floppy connector (example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHsf3qRVWVw)
Some years ago i tried the method 4 with a pentium3 motherboard with windows XP.
The system recognized the drive, and i was able to read the data from 5.25" floppy. But there were a serious bug: at a certain point, the drive started to overwrite disks with the content of a disk I inserted before!
I don't know if it was a problem of drivers, controllers, OS or other, but i need something more secure and reliable.
Now i have another old motehrboard (it supports pentium4 and some early core2 processors) with a floppy connector, but i don't know if it's a good idea tro try to use it, it may have the same bugs of the other motherboard.
What should I do?