Adding 5.25 Drive

[Ray Stainer]

I need to access many 5.25" floppy disks which I have just recovered from storage.
They contain some vital data which I need to access, so I am thinking of connecting a 5.25" disk driver to an existing multimedia machine which I use for instruction and testing. Is there likely to be any problem because it is not a modern 3.5" disk, and what special precautions should I take. Thank you for attention.

[mjc]

Pretty sure it should work, but you probably won't have anywhere to permanently mount it. And I would scan each disk with an up to date virus scan (some of the older scanners didn't do to well removing a virus, if they even attempted to). Just be sure to use the floppy connector (many of them have room for two drives) and make sure that you have the option for b drive enabled in BIOS, some are set to autodetect another floppy.

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mjc
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[tjaymadison]

Did you have to dust any cobwebs off that drive, Ray? http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif Shouldn't be much of a problem at all. You may have to get a different floppy data/ribbon cable if yours doesn't have all the right connectors. The correct one will probably have five connectors on it -- one for the mobo, two for 3.5" drives, and two for 5.25" drives. The older 5.25" drives had jumper pins at the rear, sometimes toward the edge of the circuit board, marked DS0, DS1 or something like that. You would need to put the jumper on the lowest DS (Drive Select) number, and then plug the power and ribbon cables into the drive. The data connector on the cable may or may not be "keyed" to match a slot in the contact area, so you can only put it on one way. If it's not, look for a "1" printed near one side of the gold contacts, and put the cable on so that the colored stripe is toward that side. Good Luck! http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif

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"When I nod my head, hit it with the hammer."
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[Paleo Pete]

IT will work fine, I have one on this machine that I use to transfer downloaded files to XT/AT machines. A couple things you need to know:

Set the proper floppy size in BIOS. The rest of the installation has already been pretty well covered. The ribbon cable described has two plugs at each of the floppy drive locations, one for 3½" and one for 5¼". They'll be about 2" apart. Each location can use either drive type.

When you start transferring files, if they are going onto a machine with a 360K drive, (the older black ones are 360K, the beige or white drives are usually 1.2MB) you'll have to format te disks on the target machine. If they are formatted on a 1.2MB drive it won't write the track 0 correctly and the 360K drive won't read them. After formatting they should work fine, but they must be formatted on the 360K drive to be usable after writing them on a 1.2MB drive. It's only the formatting that makes the difference. After formatting on the 360K you can write info to them on a 1.2MB drive and they should work fine, I do it all the time.

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