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

Better than being a VistaTard like you that puts it down because it wouldn't run fast enough to suit you on your 5 year old Piece of Shit box.

Maybe one to 10 now, and then retire for 3-15 years. Then *bang* lotza milling around for a way to read those floppies. Only last year, i had to do some running around in order to read about 200 fanfold and rolled punched paper tape (darn good thing i did not have to deal with 80-column punched cards).

All you have to do is photograph (read scan) them and write an OCR like app to read the photos (hell, you could probably teach an OCR reader to do it). No bulky card reader hardware required that way.

Go for any old MS-DOS box from the mid 90's and a copy of Anadisk. I was able to read my old Kaypro-4 disks. And with a copy of "Inside CP/M" and a day or two of Perl hacking convert them to files.

Anadisk will read anything that the floppy controller can process. Strange sector numbers (Kaypro puts sectors 0-9 on one side and sectors 10-19 on the other), variable sector sizes, whatever. It even, with analysis mode, said that the "previous formatting" information that PC-DOS 6.1 puts on your disk when you reformat it was on Track 81, sector 128.

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

No, there are differences. Two of the drive select lines from the early floppy interface were changed to disk change and to detect the size switch for the 3.5" floppy drives. most 1.2 MB floppy drives are compatible with the newer interface, but the 360 and 720 KB 5.25" drives weren't.

Might be worth giving a modern computer a try, but booting into MSDOS or one of the other DOS's such as DRDOS or FREEDOS (eg. from a bootable DVD).