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What's my best option for using a 5.25 drive?

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First post, by ubertrout

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I was recently gifted a used 1.2 M (I assume) 5.25 floppy drive, which I plan to use pretty much exclusively for archival data recovery. My main thought was to put it in my Dell Dimension V350, which is of the vintage where I'd think it would work, but I don't know if the floppy controller supports two drives and/or 5.25 drives at all. I also have a Asus P5Q based system running WinXP, which has a floppy controller (and a working 1.44 drive) but I assume is far too new for a 1.2M drive. Final option is to get a Greaseweazle and play with that on a modern system. What do people think?

Reply 1 of 4, by BitWrangler

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I've had boards new in 2001ish detecting/using 5.25 drives fine, but haven't even tried newer than that. I have noticed though that 1.44 is sometimes the only option available in the BIOS on later boards. However, non-OEM motherboards would tend to be the most flaxible. I think after XP it was the OS causing trouble with them. Under straight DOS, anything with a 34pin floppy interface, and not an IDE floppy/LS-120 drive, should be able to get any size/type drive working with correct cable and setup, by using the drivparm command. (I don't know the incantations offhand, you'll have to consult a grimoire) But BIOS support makes them bootable vs just readable/writeable.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 2 of 4, by Horun

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The Dell should support both 1.44m and 1.2m floppies, though it only support one drive at a time according to manual (fwiw My Compaq P2 board is that way).
The Asus supports one floppy drive and can be 1.44m or 720k only (from the manual)

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 4 of 4, by BitWrangler

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YW, I wanna say as a rough guide, majority of boards were supporting through socket A and 423/478 but after that it gets spotty. Look for the "warning label" in the promo/ad materials that says "legacy free" treat boards with no parallel, serial or PS/2 ports with suspicion. But that's only a warm/cold type indicator not guarantee.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

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