Do you really mean CD-R and not CD-RW? Because a CD-R can be read by any drive, as it does not look any different to a pressed CD to the unit. Only very old drives with weak read-out circuits may have trouble. I'm not aware of any IDE drive that can not read a CD-R.

derSammler wrote on 2020-03-02, 14:22:

I'm not aware of any IDE drive that can not read a CD-R.

Maybe it's just because it's knackered then 😒

Time for an new old one.

cookertron wrote on 2020-03-02, 13:51:

The new one (ideally) should support CD-R's which I know is a bit hit and miss but I'm sure later models would be more adapted to reading them than the early ones. It should also be able to operate under DOS 6.22 or later.

This is unclear. It would be harder to find an IDE drive that doesn't read CD-Rs and that doesn't work under DOS. Or have you seen something to the contrary?

Of course, if you can only find IDE DVD drives, those should likewise work fine under DOS and read CD-Rs. (You might not necessarily be able to read DVDs under DOS, but that's a software problem.)

The only real disadvantage to a newer, faster drive is that it can make a lot of noise when it spins up, but there are utilities to limit the speed and make them quieter. And of course it's not "period correct" if you want to obsess over that for some reason. See for instance EARLIEST CD-ROM Drives that could Read CD-R's ??? .

Oh wait, if you know of a USB floppy disk read/writer for windows 10 that supports legacy formats I'd be truly grateful.

What do you mean by a "legacy format"? Do you have a USB drive already that does not meet your needs somehow?

Jorpho wrote on 2020-03-02, 14:36:

Oh wait, if you know of a USB floppy disk read/writer for windows 10 that supports legacy formats I'd be truly grateful.

What do you mean by a "legacy format"? Do you have a USB drive already that does not meet your needs somehow?

Normally, in practice, USB floppy drives can read/write 1,44MB, 720KB and 360KB just fine.
The latter is perhaps true only if the floppy was formatted under real DOS,
while running on an XT machine that lacks BIOS support for 720KB and beyond (floppy drive irrelevant).

WinX on the other hand, is another thing. I don't know much about it and I'm glad for that.
There was an issue I heard which affected internal FDD controller support. It was dropped at some point,
but MS "listened" to user complaints and brought it back.

Jo22 wrote on 2020-03-02, 15:04:

WinX on the other hand, is another thing. I don't know much about it and I'm glad for that.
There was an issue I heard which affected internal FDD controller support.

If it's a software problem, then there's always USB passthrough with a virtual machine.

As the other thread stated in detail, CD-R support is a trial-and-error process. They do look like a pressed CD, for the most part, but the reflectivity is different so the laser pickup needs to be able to adjust its power and/or sensitivity to effectively read the disc. Older drives were statically calibrated with trim pots, which may drift, and the laser certainly ages over time, so even reading pressed CDs can be a challenge. CD-Rs aren't likely to work as well (or at all) in an older, manually-calibrated drive that has seen lots of use.

Then, there's no "it does read CD-Rs" or "it does not read CD-Rs" verdict. You may get one disc to work and not another, and a different drive will have the opposite affinity. Different media, burn speed, burning drive, and reading drive combinations will yield different levels of success. Try it and see. Again, the more modern the drive, the more likely it is to read anything you throw at it.

CD-RW support is even worse, but that whole format doesn't seem to have ever really caught on as much. Too expensive and with questionable compatibility in the old days, then CD-Rs got cheap enough to be disposable, then flash media got cheap enough and USB ubiquitous enough that there wasn't as much need for a high-ish capacity re-writable disc anyway.

Thanks for your support guys.

To clear some of the points up.

The CD drive I've been using has been able to read one CD-R (an SB16 driver CD) but since changing CD brand to Verbatim it has stopped. It has also since then stopped functioning altogether. From this I determined that CD-R compatibility was something of a hit a miss affair and after a quick search on this forum I found this thread: [SOLVED] Old CD-ROM drives and CD-Rs which further seeded my conclusion.

The floppy disk drive I've got is branded Chuanganzhuo, I can format 1.44mb floppies with it but they're not readable in my 486 machine. I can also "burn" disk images to them (for instance Borland Turbo Assembler Disk 1) but again aren't readable in the 486. The best I can get is a directory listing. I can format floppy disk in the 486 but they're not readable using the USB floppy disk drive in Windows 10. This lead me to believe that the USB floppy disk drive doesn't support certain FAT formats or Windows 10 doesn't. Either way it's a pain and I would love a solution to that. But as Jorpho suggested it maybe worth setting up an old Windows virtual machine that supports Guest Additions so I can transfer files onto disks formatted under DOS 6.22 using USB pass through.

Anthony

IDE optical drives I like the most is LG, I'm on lookout for them and buy them. Laser in these lives longest than anything I had.

Cheers,

While old CD drives may indeed have problems with CD-Rs, I don't believe there was any point where IDE optical disc drives ceased to be compatible with DOS drivers.

The floppy disk drive I've got is branded Chuanganzhuo, I can format 1.44mb floppies with it but they're not readable in my 486 machine. I can also "burn" disk images to them (for instance Borland Turbo Assembler Disk 1) but again aren't readable in the 486.

What if you format the disk in the 486 and then write a disk image with the USB drive?

Do you have any floppies handy that originated from elsewhere? Do they work fine in both drives? (I dimly recall that, in theory, if a drive's heads become misaligned, then it will only be able to read and write its own disks.)

What he said. ^^ Probably either your USB drive's heads are mis-aligned, or your 486's are. There's no format difference between them. Windows of any version will write the disk in FAT12 format. That's the standard for floppies, and has been since the days of yore. The only concern you need to have is whether it's 1.4MB or 720K. Some USB drives don't handle 720K very well. Otherwise, if the disk doesn't exchange between the two of them, it's almost definitely a hardware issue. Try a third device as a tie-breaker. (Buy a new 1.4MB 3.5" drive for your 486 if needs be.)