Re: Can modern PCs run 5-1/4" floppy drives?

At the hardware level, there is no difference between 3.5" floppies and 5.25" floppies. You can format one as the other. You can read either format no matter what the BIOS thinks. The only thing you need to do at the BIOS level is enable the controller. For formating floppies, you have to format the correct # of sectors/track. XP still has the capability; I don't know about that POS vista.

It takes a true POS like you not to know.

End in India, usually, and then they say what's in the manual for BIOS settings (which say "nope").

Ah, so I could possibly rig up a bunch of relays or bus switches and have a HW toggle up front? The BIOS will only recognize one floppy drive. So XP won't even get to see them I guess.

Not dell. They'll tell you to 're-initialize' (reformat and blow everything away).

You silly goose. All you need is the right cable. The standard floppy interface can handle two drives, either 3.5" or 5.25".

The BIOS is just there to initialize the controller and load the OS. Once the OS is running, it is out of the picture. Any OS more modern than about DOS 2.x will re-initialize the floppy controller, scan for available drives, etc.

Just get the cable and try it. You've nothing to lose.

you're pathetic.

Ok then, I'll just give it a shot. Have to splice in the power somehow because new PCs have SATA power jacks instead of Molex. Normally I'd just snip, strip, solder and shrink tube but in this case the warranty would be toast if I did. Off-the-shelf adapters usually work the other way around. Oh well.

This would be sweet. It would mean I'd only have to find a LPT/RS232 card for PCI, somewhere. The usual Foxconn boards have that, not this one :-(

Interesting. It's taking forever for optical drives to go SATA, and power supplies have also been very slow to make the move. I just built a file server with 8 SATA drives and had to buy a few molex->Y->:SATA power adapters as the power supply, as is typical, only had 4 SATA connectors.

Maybe solder to the power supply connector of the existing 3.5" floppy drive to avoid cutting into your PS wiring?

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Yep, that's what I am going to do. Don't see any other way.

Just set the floppy type in your old computer to 1.44M for the 5-1/4" drive, and see whether Windows will work with the drive. My guess is it won't, because the floppy drives aren't plug and play devices. This means the Windows floppy disk driver is unable to determine what kind of drive is on the connector, and therefore cannot initialize the interface to suit the floppy drive type.

Does winXP read FDs formated other than 720kB & 1,44Mb ???

IMHO NO !!! (it does not recognise even MS native 1,66Mb formated installation FDs ... no problem whatsoever with win9x !

-- Regards , SPAJKY ® mail addr. @ my site @

You've verified that XP won't read 1.66mb floppies and that is good information, but have you actually tried 1.2MB 5.25 floppies?

If that was really the case and I had 5.25 floppies to copy, then I'd probably put a 2G fat16 partition on my first hard drive, probably at the start via partition magic, boot off a windows 98's DOS recovery disk, freedos or a very small linux on CD or memory stick, and copy every single 5.25 floppy over to the hard drive partition. I'd probably do it bitwide and copy the floppies to image files.

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This is bullshit since even the windows GUI format dialog box allows one to (actually you must) select the formatted size.

Also, the DOS format command required the user to set switches to tell the format applet how to format the media. There was the A: drive, and the B: drive. After that there were track and sector switches that had to be included in the format command entry.

In other words, it didn't matter what was hooked up to A: or B:, what mattered was how you utilized it.

It sees 2.88 just fine.

Blow it out you ass.

Spajky Spajky@##volja.net posted to sci.electronics.design:

I have never touched a 1.66 MB floppy. The standard 5.25" size is

Hell NO. 5 1/4 inch (and 8 inch) 1.2 megabyte drives run at 360 RPM.

Mark Zenier snipped-for-privacy@eskimo.com Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)

No I haven´t tried any 5,25? disks at lest for last 10y ...

but that my info was for an example for 3,5? FDs. formated I used MAXIDisk

for those 5,25? ones... maybe can be found some old PC on some friends attick or basement in-between "junk" to use it to copy data/make image of them onto some other media ...

-- Regards , SPAJKY ® mail addr. @ my site @