My 5.25" floppy drive worked in my nforce 2 mobo with Windows 2000. Not sure if XP still has 5.25" support.

As long as your BIOS has the option then you should be good.

hdcopy uses similar low-level floppy access, but don't know if you
find it for download (was freeware iirc.)

Unstopabble can be used to force read retries. I don't know if it will work for floppies, though.

leileilol wrote:

VGACopy is apparently one of the best but google says a lot about it being spyware.

Back in the days when VGA-Copy was written, spyware did not yet exist in the form we know it today. The Google links you mentioned deal with a completely different program.
However, all the relevant info on VGA-Copy (the diskette copying utility) on the net seems to be available in German language only...

This is the webpage of the Author, who kindly released the latest version of VGA-Copy as freeware (see attachment).

I used to run diskcopyplus(dcp), the cracked one.

VGACopy is cool, though it often does 'out of memory - aborted!' 🙁