Or you could try helping him more and more (without expecting anything in return 😊 ) till he is overwhelmed. Who knows, he might part with his entire collection for free 😈 (i.e. if he himself is not a member of VOGONS or other such forums).

🤣 As far as I know he doesn't have a collection. But yeah sorry that sounded one selfish of me, I didn't really expect anything in return but in the past in other circumstances he has always found ways to be annoying.

Also that is a scary thought 🤣. My nieghbor on Vogons, no I doubt he is he simply isn't the type.

King_Corduroy wrote:

🤣 Yeah he really is but not in the "get off my lawn!" way he's more of a weirdo who is really self centered. Anytime you go to help him (most of the time cause he is a fucking idiot) he does something to kick sand in your face right after you finish helping.

That's when you start billing him. X amount of dollars per hour, minimum of one hour. I happily help friends and family for free (even though I'm more network/telecom engineer than PC guy these days), but asshats gotta pay. The bigger the jerk, the higher my billing rate. Helps weed out the numbnuts that like to take advantage *really* fast.

Or simply buy one. $20 is not the end of the world.

I had a hard time finding 5.25" drives a while ago when they were $40 a pop on ebay but ran into a local recycler and purchased a whole stack of them for $20. For somebody who just needs one $20 is a decent price, its the collectors/hoarders like myself that look for them in bulk. 😉

There are systems where a 5.25" floppy drive or two is pretty much unavoidable. The IBM PC and XT usually came with a full height Tandon TM100-2A or equivalent. Those systems had full height bays, making it difficult to mount two half height drives without a special mounting kit. The PCjr. and PC Portable came with half-height 5.25" drives, and to remove them is like putting the motherboard into a new case.

The primary purpose of these drives is to image floppies. However, for the low density drives, if you have a copy-protected game you cannot crack, you need the drive.

Well to be honest I took the half hieght drive out of the PCjr to write bootleg copies of some games to diskette so that I could try them out on the PCjr. I plopped in into a '96 Packard Bell platinum 55 which is acting as my gateway computer between the ancient and the modern and I wrote the diskettes then returned the drive to the PCjr to test out the games.

It's a super inefficient way of doing things but since I only have one drive it's the only thing I can do besides buy original copies of the games I want (but I would rather try them out first since the PCjr is finnicky).

Just out of curiosity, why do you consider $15-$20 to be an outrageous price? I have an old 5.25" drive lying around that I always meant to install in some old computer, but never got around to. If I was going to sell it, I don't think I would part with it for less than $50.

Well because generally I pay 10 - 20$ for whole computer systems. Paying that much for one drive seems ridiculous. 🤣

Ah, that makes sense. I guess I don't buy enough retro computers to know. All my old computers are the ones I grew up with as a kid.

Yeah for my PCjr system which included the computer, the monitor, 1x joystick, the PCjr 2nd release keyboard with cable (Which is RARE to get the cable), and a pile of software I payed a whopping 10$. At the time the man also had a 5150 computer sitting there but since I was a bit younger and this was my first foray into retro computing I didn't buy it for the 5$ he was asking. (At the time I didn't want it because it had no monitor, little did I know I had just passed up the 24 carrot gold find and grabbed the lemon instead. 🤣 )

The Teac FD505 is very useful. I was lucky to get two unused 'new old stock' units as office cast-offs a few years ago. One is in use and the other in storage.

On a related subject, there should be a blacklist somewhere on the forum of old motherboards where the BIOS doesn't support 2 simultaneous floppy drives. Most modern mobos have this limitation, which is understandable, but I notice some manufacturers already began doing this in the P4 era. If you want to build a retro P4 system with a 5.25" drive this is a problem.

Yeah none of my P4 computers support anything older than 1.44 3.5" floppy diskette drives, and I'm fairly certain you can only have one.

King_Corduroy wrote:

Hey I was just wondering, are 5.25" floppy diskette drives really as rare as ebay would suggest? I mean I need one for transferring files easily from my regular computers to a computer with USB and 5.25" floppy disk compatibility (which I have) so that I can write and read disks for and from my IBM PCjr. However I'm not really willing to pay the going rate on ebay which is about 15$ - 20$ with shipping. Is it just me or does it seem like the sellers are price gauging?

Also is there a place I can look for some more reasonable prices?

Depending on the area you live in, YES, they are that rare. I bought one in the late 90s at a local computer parts store, and that was the last one in town. Period. Ebay, or a collector is going to be your best bet for finding one.

Be ye forewarned, that 5-1/4 floppy disks tend to fail over time. I held onto a bunch of original Sierra game disks, and maybe 10% of them were still readable, and I had kept them in a proper storage case in a cool, humidity free area. the 3-1/2 inch floppies seemed to fair better.

leileilol wrote:

It's looking more feasible to buy a old PC from ebay with oen than an individual drive

Once you do get your 5.25" drive, IMAGE YOUR FLOPPIES LIKE THE WIND 🤣 I sued Resqflpy. My floppies still worked fortunately. Decades-old cardboard boxes are amazing!

I second the motion. Anything on floppies is on the verge of deteriorating beyond readability if it hasn't already. You should have multiple backups of anything sold on a floppy. It's not just a suggestion at this point, it's mandatory.

King_Corduroy wrote:

Yeah none of my P4 computers support anything older than 1.44 3.5" floppy diskette drives, and I'm fairly certain you can only have one.

You are probably correct on the "have one" part, but... at least my Asus P4C800-E dlx claims to allow for 'ALL' standard PC types* in the bios, in the 1 single option (A-disk) that is presented there.
Not tested though.

(*: it lists 5 separate options as follows: 360kb/1.2mb 5.25'', 720kb/1.44mb/2.88mb 3.5'')

Yes I think BIOSs usually allow both 3.5" 1.44 MB and 5.25" 1.2 MB drives, just not at the same time. I know the Asus P4C800-E does this. OTOH the ABIT IC7-G allows you to have both, and this is where I have the Teac FD-505 installed. A while ago I used it to check/format about 100 old 5.25" disks I got on eBay and it worked perfectly. This was under Windows 2000.

Edit: though be aware that the IC7-G has problems of its own, particularly a buggy gigabit Ethernet adaptor

King_Corduroy wrote:

Well because generally I pay 10 - 20$ for whole computer systems. Paying that much for one drive seems ridiculous. 🤣

Your expectations are too high because of good deals!

Seriously, for a 5.25" drive that's known to work, $20 is reasonable. I think I paid about $30 for an Epson combo drive for my 386 build.

It just comes down to how much value you put on convenience. Consider the time and effort you'll save yourself by having a second drive.

You can always earn more money, but time wasted farting around with component-swapping can never be recovered!

🤣 Yeah I actually bid on a Mitsumi 1.44mb 5.25" drive quite a while ago. It's already installed in my Packard Bell.
I payed 17$ for it with shipping, so not to horribly bad and as you can see it matches the colour of the Packard perfectly.
Be it noted that I had a hard time getting it to work at first because it has a row of jumpers in the back to set various things but now that I have that figured out it works perfectly. Of course it needed to be cleaned but that should be done anyhow. 😜

Here is the drive right after I took it out of the envelope the seller sent it in. (I was quite mad that he sent it in something so light)

During the process of getting it to recognize by playing with the jumpers. It's the drive pointed at the ground hanging from the side of the case.

Finally getting it to work in Windows 98SE! God I can't tell you how happy that made me. 🤣

As you can see by dumb luck the yellowed white plastic matches the case perfectly! I couldn't believe it.