I should have known better...
To be fair on the seller, I will prelude this post by saying at this stage, I haven't yet been able to verify if the goods were damaged in transport or not.
Getting in to game collecting a few months back, I picked up a copy of Ultima V and Sword of Argon from an op-shop (thrift shop) for about a dollar each, both on 5.25" Floppy for IBM compatible, what a find!
I've been looking for a 5.25inch Drive to stick in my DosBox for some time now, Hola! - A Newtronics 5.25" Floppy Disk Drive Made in Japan 2C28K0397 shows up on ebay for a reasonable price none of that RARE, VINTAGE crap, the guy says the drive works, and it only needs to travel 135.5 km to get to my house. (2 hours by car)
Huzzah! It arrives the very next day,
In a paper envelope,
No bubble wrap,
Cardboard!
Tightly packed I'll give it that...
Shouldn't there be a cardboard placeholder disk or sacrificial disk to lock the read/write head?
So far it hasn't made any strange noises...
But I've been having trouble getting the thing to work in Windows 98 for a variety of reasons:
- Floppy cable orientation and placement on the chain,
- Dead CMOS battery and needing to tell the BIOS what format the drive is,
- The 5.25" Floppy Disk jumpers that I'm sure are correct and
- The disks I'm testing with, I am only confident that one of them works and it's a 720k disk (I know for sure a written on a 720k drive),
- I am pretty certain that my drive is a 1.2mb model given its build date (1992),
But this last part is for another thread, for all I know the drive could be DOA and I'm just wasting my time, but what a journey it has been.
What I should have done was been a bit more patient and messaged the guy and asked if he knew how to ship a drive like this and offered to send him a sacrificial disk to lock the read/write head.
Live and learn I guess.