Great idea! I will get out there sometime next week! Thank you! I assume no one will think I'm weird if I walk in with a couple small boxes of floppies? :) (~ 10 x 5.25" and 10 x 3.5") On Fri, Nov 26, 2021 at 2:36 PM Bill Degnan via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
John, The guest registration PC at Kennett Classic is a Win 3.1 system with a 1.2 (5 1/4")and 1.44 (3.5") drives. It's in Kennett Square PA which is about 40 minutes from you. Feel free to drive down and use this system to copy your disks to 3.5" and from there you can copy to a modern machine. Bill Degnan kennettclassic.com
On Fri, Nov 26, 2021 at 2:07 PM John Heritage via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
Hey All! :)
I have a small amount of old 5.25" floppies I'd like to read some data off of. Does anyone have a working 5.25" HD drive that I could borrow?
I have a Socket 7 system and a pair of 5.25" drives that seem bad.
Drive 1 read a couple of disks "ok" -- the data was intact, took several tries. After swapping to Drive 2 to see if it was more reliably, Drive 1 now won't power up.
Drive 2 also would read some disks but even less reliably than drive 1. I took the protective cover off of Drive 2, carefully used some canned air, and then carefully alcohol swabbed the read/write heads (as I have in the past with my Atari 8bit drives). Let it sit, and it read one more disk, but since then - even with additional cleanings won't read or write anything.
I have both some old OEM disks (i.e. copies of PCBoard) I've tried using, and also a box of definitely unused 1.2MB floppies that look very clean, and can't get either config working. I'd actually like to read that PCBoard disk if possible so I stopped 'testing' with it and just focused on the clean unused disk.
Anyway, I'd love to rent or borrow a 5.25" HD / 1.2mb drive that is good. I can paypal over some $ as a deposit or whatever if necessary. I have about 12 disks I want to read data off of and then i'll be done with the drive. I'm located in the King of Prussia PA area but have no problem driving wherever if in person is preferred.
Thanks! John