Drive for old 5.25" Flexible Floppies?

David Lyell Said:

"I can't seemingly find any adapters/drives to read old school 5.25" Mini-Floppy Disks, and so I'm posting here."

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To Clarify...

• eBay.com Search for these drives on eBay. There are plenty depicted on the site.

• images.google.com Search for images of these drives and adapters, using Google Image Search

• Virtual Machines: Look into using a virtual machine to run this hardware. You would need to install an Operating System compatible with this. It is the only workaround to using drivers of sorts. Virtual Machine Programs are VMWare Fusion and Parallels.

• Vintage Mac: You would most likely need to use a Vintage Mac for these; eBay most certain has them. Perhaps, you can buy all needed items together? If there are issues with a purchase, contact eBay.

The Mac did not natively use that kind of floppies, and finding the hardware and a Mac that can talk to them will be extremely difficult.

If those floppies were from a PC, it would be far, far easier to find an old PC with a floppy drive.

David Lyell Said:

"I can't seemingly find any adapters/drives to read old school 5.25" Mini-Floppy Disks, and so I'm posting here."

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Search for it on eBay, and you'll come across it.

Can you provide som pictures of these? Doing so, we might know just what you need.

This is intriguing, and I’m confidant we can get this solved.

Important: Blank out any personal Information, using the Preview app. Paste white squares over such information, for easy reading, as it’s contrast would stick out over a black-colored disk.

Hi,

If you still have AppleII, 5.25inch floppy drive, DOS3.3 or ProDOS format is available at eBay, though...

There are some projects out there where people have created drive controllers that work with modern computers. Really convoluted too, such as using a Raspberry Pi board.

y_p_w wrote:

I don’t believe there was ever a Mac format compatible with 5-1/4 floppies. I had a Macally

3-1/2 that worked.

What format?

There was one. But it is really OLD. It may not have been Apple brand, possibly used for PC compatibility.

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If you have survived for these many years without the stuff on those 5.25 floppies, it could not have been that important.

No.

The drive for the Mac was for reading and writing PC-formatted floppies. it is called the Apple PC floppy drive, and has a genuine 37-pin floppy drive connector. there was separate card for a Mac-II, or you could hook it up to the floppy connector on your Mac286 two-card PC for the Mac-II.

And the reason I know that is ... I went to the place where mine would be if I still had it, and I still do.

The Apple II was doing its own thing. Its floppies were not compatible with anything but the Apple II..

Thanks for the Picture!

BTW! A friend of mine had their first computer: a VT180 DEC System. It had four 5.25 inch floppy drives, and ran the CPM Operating System. The notch on the side is for write-protection. So, if you made the disc double-sided, you had to cut a notch on the other side as well.

Sounds like a lot of work to me☹️, but also a lot of fun🙂, with the electronic archaeology!

There were a variety of ways to deal with write protection. A lot of commercial software used bulk duplicators that ignored the notch, and there were disks that had no notch. My blank disks would come with a sheet of stickers to cover the notch. And I believe the PC standard was for two heads so the only way they were supposed to be used was label side up.

It was never a good idea to punch additional holes in them, because the oxides used on the two types were different.

The difference was dramatic enough that by the time you had finished copying a full disk, the initial blocks copied could have already deteriorated (due to the wrong coercivity of the oxide) such that the data were already lost.

I don’t believe there was ever a Mac format compatible with 5-1/4 floppies. I had a Macally

3-1/2 that worked.

What format?

I’m trying to understand how another format would be readable via a Mac. I’m thinking some my old DOS3.3 floppies might be readable with a working Apple II.