retro games 100 wrote:

The following webpage shows an ebay seller's 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drives for sale -

http://stores.shop.ebay.co.uk/PRICE-ATTACK-ST … ?_nkw=vintage+5

I need a drive that accepts 5.25" 1.2MB high density disks. Please can someone tell me if these things for sale are suitable? Thanks a lot! 😀

Just check that it's not a 360k model you're getting..just google the modelnumbers
It's very hard to find cleaning discs for these nowdays so I'd get a bunch of them so you have a better chance of ending up with a working one.

Look for descriptions with

5.25" or 5¼ inch
{
a.) 1.2MB FDD
b.) 2DHD FDD
c.) 2SHD FDD
d.) High Density
e.) 1.2
f.) 1.2MB High Density Floppy Disk Drive (duh! 😜)
}

/*Where

FDD = Floppy Disk Drive
2DHD/2SHD = Double Sided High Density

*/

Amigaz wrote:

It's very hard to find cleaning discs for these nowdays so I'd get a bunch of them so you have a better chance of ending up with a working one.

Can you not take them apart and clean the heads?

I had a 5 1/4 drive about 8 years ago but my brothers kid crammed a CD into it so I tossed it. I could have took it apart I guess to get the disk out but I had no games for it anyway.

If you really must get a 5.25" drive, I suggest finding one of the spiffy combo 3.5"+5.25" drives. 😀

I'm thinking that all of these are HD but I could be wrong.

didn't know there were combo drives...

I've seen those and have always wondered if you need 2 floppy IDE connections or just 1 to connect it to the motherboard...

nope, they somehow use just one connector.

Crazy! Would be interesting to get one that is an external USB drive.

TEAC, get a TEAC. Best drives there is. Massive testing was done with catweasel, TEAC drives are the best floppies after testing more than 80 drives.

Apparently 5.25" USB floppy drives don't exist 🙁

I had a combo drive before with my 286.

swaaye wrote:

nope, they somehow use just one connector.

Sounds incredible, but it seems possible. Never saw a drive like that though.

They only need to reproduce the twisted wires of the floppy cable in the unit.

The combo drive that I had used just one of the edge connector hookups (the typical 5.25" connection).

Everyone, thanks a lot.

I ordered this thing, a Mitsubishi drive. I'm not sure why it's missing its top cover. When it arrives, I'll let you know if it can read my SSI RPG "Krynn" high density 5.25" disks.

retro games 100 wrote:

I'm not sure why it's missing its top cover.

Ermm....which cover do you mean? It looks fine to me. These drives mostly look this way. If you mean that you can see the internal components from the top, it's perfectly normal. I can't remember seeing a covered drive. Maybe slightly expensive or branded drives come with it. External drives like those for Mac are fully covered.

Anyway, I hope you do have a 5.25" FDD cleaner. (Or you can clean it manually.) To protect both the disks and the drive. You might never know which can cause the initial problem after all these years.

Thanks for correcting my mistake - I didn't realise these things have no top cover.

The 5.25" floppy disk drive has just arrived. One cable (top, 2 wires) was plugged in, the other cable (bottom, 3 wires) was not plugged in. I thought perhaps this 3 wire cable had come loose during shipping, and so I plugged it in - see photo. Was this the correct thing to do? (I haven't tested this drive yet.)

I decided to go ahead and test the drive. I have left that bottom 3 wire cable plugged in. I am guessing it needs to be plugged in. I attached the drive to an Athlon based mobo, and went in to its BIOS Setup area. I set the A: drive to be 1.2M 5.25, and also enabled the onboard FDD controller. Inside Windows 98, I examined the Device Manager area. In it, I could see a Generic floppy disk and a standard floppy disk controller. I guess that's OK.

So, I put in an old 5.25" disk, which was a very old D&D disk called "Pools of Radiance". Then I ran Windows Explorer, and clicked on the 5 1/4 floppy disk icon above the C:\ drive icon, so that I could browse the contents of this floppy disk. After about 15 seconds of "disk whirring", a pop up message box appeared saying -

The disk in drive A is not formatted
Do you want to format it now?

I decided to Restart Windows 98 in MS-DOS mode, and try accessing the A:\ drive at the command prompt, but this gives me the error message of -

General failure reading drive A

Any ideas please people?

Edit: I'm using a floppy disk cable with 5 "plugs" on it. One plug goes in to the mobo, the other 4 are at the other end of the cable. 2 are for 3.5" drives, 2 are for 5.25" drives. I have plugged the very end plug, in effect the 5th plug, in to the 5.25" drive. None of the other 3 "disk drive plugs" are being used for anything. Is this OK?

Edit 2: I've just tried using the middle 5.25" plug on the floppy ribbon cable, instead of the end plug. This time, inside Windows Explorer, I get the following pop up message box error -

A:\ is not accessible
The device is not ready

I've tried 2 floppy disks - "Pools of Radiance", and a newer disk called "Dark Queen of Krynn" which is specifically labelled "high density disk". On the drive itself, there is a date stamp of 6/1992. I guess this is not an ancient drive, and I am guessing it's capable of reading a high density disk OK.

Perhaps it's faulty?