Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2012 14:45:29 -0700 From: cisin at xenosoft.com To: cctalk at classiccmp.org Subject: Re: Copying 5.25 inch floppy disks On Sun, 3 Jun 2012, Tom Gardner wrote: Before anybody gets into the cockamamie advice of catweasel V diskferret, where are you? Have machines with 5.25" drives become that difficult to find? Unless you have OTHER plans and goals, you do NOT need a 5.25" interface for your current computer; you need a couple of hours use of a vintage machine. Even if you have to do two steps - 5.25" to 3.5", 3.5" to "cloud", . . . Do you have software that won't choke on WordPervert files?

On Sun, 3 Jun 2012, Tom Gardner wrote: Before anybody gets into the cockamamie advice of catweasel V diskferret, where are you? Have machines with 5.25" drives become that difficult to find?

--- On Sun, 6/3/12, Tom Gardner <tom94022 at comcast.net> wrote: looks 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

How does one copy a Floppy Disk Drive? ;-)

Or, if you are lucky enough to own a starship, simply use your replicator.