Copying 5.25 inch floppy disks

--- On Sun, 6/3/12, Tom Gardner <tom94022 at comcast.net> wrote: If they're just PC disks, then the easiest, fastest, cheapest method would be to simply use an older PC with a 5 1/4" floppy drive... The drives are dirt common and all PC's can use them up until about the late P4 era. There should be absolutely no problem finding the equipment to actually read the disks and copy the data to something else. The various USB disk interface solutions are vast overkill if all you want to do is copy files from MSDOS format floppies, since the "vintage" hardware is not that old, or hard to find/operate. I mean, I suppose if you get really stuck, someone here could probably read them for you - I know I have the equipment necessary to read them, and doing so would be no problem - except that it takes a rather long time to read in a couple hundred floppies... Where are you located? Of course, that solves the "getting the files off the disks onto other media" problem, you're on your own to find something to read the files themselves. Word processor file formats are subject to change. -Ian