I have some files saved onto 5 1/4" floppies and wish to transfer them to 3 1/2" floppies.
I have a 486 running Windows 95. If I fit a 5 1/4" drive to my 486 in addition to the 3 1/2" drive will i be able to copy the files using Windows or will Diskcopy in DOS do it OR does anyone have any other suggestions please.

5 1/4 floppies - & still being used for storage.... wow!

Its been a long time since I used them but I am sure that you can have both drives plugged into your machine at the same time. One will be drive 'A' and the other will be drive 'B'. Then its a simple case of transferring the files. Mind you the older ones were smaller capacity so you may want to pop thm onto your PC 1st perhaps.

If it doesnt show up straight away then you may need to check in the BIOS that one of the floppy drives isnt disabled etc.

Floppy
Welcome to the forums.

If INKA's solution does not work for you try the following.

(Remember to make sure you are grounded whilst working inside box)

Disconect your 3 inch floppy drive (just the cables) and then connect your 5 inch drive. (Leave it sitting outside of the box if possible)

Boot into the BIOS to ensure that the drive is recognised then re-boot the computer.

Copy all the files from the 5 inch floppy into a folder on your desktop.

Now re-connect your 3 inch floppy drive and write files to floppy disk.

There is no reason why INKA's solution should not work. To date I haven't seen a floppy drive controller that would've supported only one device per channel. Even the good old 8088 came with two 360k shugart floppy drives.

These days you'd be hard pressed to find a 5'25" drive that's NOT a high-capacity 1.2 Mb unit. 360kb devices became totally obsolete in the late 80's.


I don't see what's so odd about using 5'25" floppies for storage... I'm still using them, since I amassed a hideous amount of these floppies in the early 90's when I needed to do some serious backuping and CD-roms were still science fiction... ;)

For some reason, I found these floppies (magnetically) to be much more reliable than their 3'5 inch counterparts...