Expansion cards. PCI is the most likely option. There are also USB solutions like Kryoflux.

He looked at the Kryoflux, and said on the site it wouldn't let him use it as an actual drive seen by Windows. His motherboard also is PCIe-only.

NightSprinter wrote:

He looked at the Kryoflux, and said on the site it wouldn't let him use it as an actual drive seen by Windows. His motherboard also is PCIe-only.

The version of Windows he's using should support the kind of floppy disk drive he wants to use - no idea if Win10 does... If it doesn't, he'll need a driver that lets him use a floppy drive. If the motherboard lacks a floppy controller and an option for floppies in the BIOS, he'll need an expansion card that provides a controller and eventual BIOS expansion and which has a driver for his Windows version.

He might have to look at industrial hardware to see whether there exists a PCIe expansion card that provides a floppy controller. Another option would be to use an expansion chassis with PCI or ISA slots that connects to an PCIe interface card with the proper kind of bridge chipset on-board...but again, drivers for his Windows version should exist.

Why does he want to use a 5.25" drive on a modern PC?

yawetaG wrote:

Why does he want to use a 5.25" drive on a modern PC?

Some people want to do this so they can more easily do data transfer to older machines or for archiving purposes.
And some may be in it for the challenge or just for the heck of it 🤣.

Still interesting to know though 😀

You can get PCIe - PCI bridges with actual PCI slots on Ebay for around $20ish.

They still sell motherboards with PCI slots, even for the upcoming AMD Ryzen (probably not with the top-end X370 chipset but the B350 will have it) and I'm fairly sure some current Intel boards have it still also (again not the highest-end boards but still decent ones).

They don't work with all PCI cards but they should be fairly compatible. And if it doesn't work natively he could try it in a VM if his CPU and motherboard support IOMMU (AKA VT-d by Intel, VMDirectPath by VMWare, etc.).

Biggest issue is unless the floppy controller is UEFI compliant you have to use legacy bios which means no greater than 2tb hard drive and no GPT

candle_86 wrote:

Biggest issue is unless the floppy controller is UEFI compliant you have to use legacy bios which means no greater than 2tb hard drive and no GPT

You can have those things, just not necessarily boot from them, in that situation. Use a 512GB or 1TB or 2TB SSD to boot and save the >2TB volumes for non-boot purposes and you shouldn't need UEFI.

yawetaG wrote:

...If the motherboard lacks a floppy controller and an option for floppies in the BIOS, he'll need an expansion card that provides a controller and eventual BIOS expansion and which has a driver for his Windows version.

Do these things even exist? I mean a new, easy to acquire PCI-e card with a real floppy controller that can write any format (unlike USB drives) would be a killer solution. A lot of people are interested in this, but obviously not enough to justify production 😠

In he has actual floppies with data to archive, like programs and stuff, he just could get the Kryoflux, archive his floppies and stuff as data images, and then sell both Kryoflux and the drive, like a sort of a kit, so other user can buy and use it to archive his/her stuff too. If he has an older PC, with the money he can buy then an actual floppy emulator and use the images made with the Kryoflux on it. If no... Money is still money 😀.

If he doesn't have anything to archive, then his best bet would be just sell the unit to someone who actually would need it. I'm sure a dual 3 1/2 & 5 1/4 floppy drive to be paired with a Kryoflux would be highly appreciated and paid in the software archiving and preservation world.

You can boot off larger drives that are not bootable by using a bootloader like GRUB!

This is something that most people forget. It doesn't matter if you can boot of it or not, the bootloader will boot it for you.

Ampera wrote:

You can boot off larger drives that are not bootable by using a bootloader like GRUB!
This is something that most people forget. It doesn't matter if you can boot of it or not, the bootloader will boot it for you.

Isn't just matter of booting the system, but also drive access after that.

If bootloader depends in BIOS INT13H for drive access, it will not be able to boot your OS if its system files are located beyond the capacity barrier of your BIOS implementation. In DOS case your bootloader needs to offer also a INT13H driver so DOS can use it to drive your HDDs instead the limited implementation offered by your BIOS.

That's why things like Ontrack DDO and the EZ-Drive INT13H loadable BIOS driver replacements exist in the first place.

Ampera wrote:

You can boot off larger drives that are not bootable by using a bootloader like GRUB!

This is something that most people forget. It doesn't matter if you can boot of it or not, the bootloader will boot it for you.

This, I done this before on several older systems. Just put grub on a 256mb or something partition and your good to go.

Also what about some sort of fdd to USB adapter? You could rewire the USB cable so it could be plugged into a froubt Pablo port

Jade Falcon wrote:

Ampera wrote:

You can boot off larger drives that are not bootable by using a bootloader like GRUB!

This is something that most people forget. It doesn't matter if you can boot of it or not, the bootloader will boot it for you.

This, I done this before on several older systems. Just put grub on a 256mb or something partition and your good to go.

Also what about some sort of fdd to USB adapter? You could rewire the USB cable so it could be plugged into a froubt Pablo port

They sell USB floppy drives, but they are largely incompatible with anything but direct copy DOS file systems (No non-DOS file systems like in bootable games)

Kyroflux runs off USB too.

I never had problem with them. Other then the lack of dos support when not booting from them. But I never had a cheap one off eBay.