i have 3 of these big drives 2 untested i found on the free table and 1 combo drive but, you can only use 1 of the 2 drives at once and switching requires changing the cable. i took the face plate of and painted it black to match my case. but, since my sd card reader's floppy needs a floppy cable i ditched the 5 incher. now if i found an sd/floppy combo with a usb floppy too i'd get single 5 incher and paint it black too and put it in assuming i could get one with out the lever as my case has a door. i had the idea of switching the green led for a blue one to match my case even more.

FYI (I only want to brag about it) I have 2 5.25 QD FDD's; TEAC; 80 tracks drives. Use them with my Acorn BBC Micros. Those Acorns can use 3.5 FDD's too, but only DD, max capacity 640 Kb (biggest you can get on those computers with official disk ROM). Tried the HD 5.25 drives too, but they are not too good dealing with DD or QD disks.

I just got a Chinon 5.25" floppy disk drive. I'm really pleased with it. It successfully installed SSI's "Dark Queen of Krynn" RPG. This game comes on two 1.2MB 5.25" floppy disks.

I would like to make a back up of these disks. The manual says that's OK to do. Please can someone recommend a DOS utility that can read a 1.2MB floppy disk, and then write it back out to a blank floppy disk. Thanks a lot.

Also, looking at the photo below, what is a "protect sheet"? The drive was shipped to me with a blank floppy disk inserted in to it. I wondered if that was to protect the unit, in some way.

retro games 100 wrote:

Please can someone recommend a DOS utility that can read a 1.2MB floppy disk, and then write it back out to a blank floppy disk.

VGA-Copy used to be quite good in making 1:1 copies, even from slightly damaged disks. The author has released it as freeware.

retro games 100 wrote:

Also, looking at the photo below, what is a "protect sheet"? The drive was shipped to me with a blank floppy disk inserted in to it. I wondered if that was to protect the unit, in some way.

The protect sheet was a piece of cardboard or plastic, inserted into the drive during transport in order to stop the moving parts (most notably the read/write heads) from clanging around and get damaged inside.

Ah yes, VGA-Copy that brings back some memories.

Worst case just type DISKCOPY A: A:

Downside is that you will need to swap disks around a few times, but otherwise it works and comes with MS DOS!

There's also Copy II PC. That's what I always used... I'd never even heard of VGA-Copy before.

Thanks a lot people! I'm trying VGA-Copy now. It formats, writes and verifies to the blank media, as you make a single-pass write from memory, where the disk image is held. Great stuff!

One of my favourites is HD-COPY.

Whoa, thread rez 🤣!

About the double drives. I've got one also (quite yellow on the front though...but meh, can't argue as I got it for free anyway). These are basically 2 separate drives melted together.
you can actually see the 3.5in drive part, if you were to take it out, it would almost be an independent drive.

I had a soft spot for 5.25" floppies. But I clearly remember that games started to grow larger and larger and once you needed ~ 6 disks to backup a game, the higher storage capacity of 3.5" floppies really made a difference.

Soon my friends didn't have 5.25" drives anymore, so that was the end of it for me. Back in those days we swapped games at school, pretty sure most of us here did the same thing.

I don't remember pricing towards the end of the 5.25" era. Where they cheaper compared to 3.5" drives?

I can also remember a brief period where at our school tape drives became very popular. The ran off the floppy drive port I believe.

I had an Iomega tape drive and also a special controller card which doubled the speed. However I found it quite unreliable, the drive would constantly go back and forth to restore something.

I can also remember a brief period where at our school tape drives became very popular. The ran off the floppy drive port I believe.

I still have one of those things, and I think a few tapes to go with it. They were slow as shite, I think mine did something like 100K/sec on 420MB tapes, but they had the nice advantage that you could back up your entire hard drive onto one or two tapes, for fairly cheap. I wish equivalent options existed for modern computers... nowadays the only decent tape drive options are $1k+ and generally require separate SCSI/SAS controllers as well.

Yea I got a Zip 100 parallel port drive shortly after that. While the capacity was lower, it was uncompressed capacity.

These tape drives used a lot of compression for quoting their specification. 420 sounds much larger than what I remember. I somehow have a figure of 80MB in my head.

Anyway the Zip drive was amazing at the time. It wasn't sequential and worked really really well. I had a little bag to put everything in so I could go to friends and copy stuff. The parallel port and simple software (just run GUEST.EXE) made it very convenient.

PS: I googled and it seems the standard was QIC-40 or QIC-80

And it looks like I had the Iomega DITTO 250 and the ISA accelerator card:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iomega_Ditto_drive

These tape drives used a lot of compression for quoting their specification. 420 sounds much larger than what I remember. I somehow have a figure of 80MB in my head.

There were a bunch of different capacities, and I think the original QIC drives were 40/80MB. Mine used either the regular QIC format, or something called QIC-Wide. The 420MB was the compressed capacity on mine... though, actually it was closer to 400MB, despite the name, and around 200MB native.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Anyway the Zip drive was amazing at the time. It wasn't sequential and worked really really well. I had a little bag to put everything in so I could go to friends and copy stuff. The parallel port and simple software (just run GUEST.EXE) made it very convenient.

I remember using the ZIP drive to copy data from our internet computer to my own computer.
I got the external ZIP drive second hand (without external powersupply...doh!) and liked it. Later on I got that slim USB version which is MUCH more convenient. I only stopped using it regularly when USB sticks started hitting the 1GB mark (as well as getting more affordable).

Btw maulwurf, if you needed to run guest.exe...how did you get that file onto the other computer?
From a floppy?

Old Thrashbarg, your backup drive must have been a later model with much higher capacity. 200MB uncompressed is actually quite good!

Tetrium, yes GUEST.EXE fits easily on a floppy disk! Back in those days everyone had a 3.5" floppy drive in their PCs.

I don't fully remember if it was a driver version or command line switch, but there was a trick to boost the performance of the parallel port Zip 100.

Firstly there where different types of parallel port modes (ECP, EPP) but I clearly remember that you could improve the performance of the Zip 100 parallel and at the faster speed setting is was very impressive indeed.

I used to have this tiny baby Unisys 486 machine which I took with me around the world (and then sourced a Monitor locally). I used the Zip 100 to install W95 on that machine and it worked really well.

Most games could also be run straight off the Zip drive.

Old Thrashbarg, your backup drive must have been a later model with much higher capacity. 200MB uncompressed is actually quite good!

It was '95 or '96 sometime... so yeah, fairly late for the floppy interface types.

Completely unrelated to the original topic, but there were also some IDE interface drives that followed... I have one of those as well, from '99 or '00. I got it in a junk box much later and I've never personally used it, but it's supposed to be capable of 20GB uncompressed, 40GB compressed, on some newer derivative of the QIC format.