Re: Old Hardware

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Author: Matt Graham
Date:  
To: Main PLUG discussion list
Subject: Re: Old Hardware
> On 1/6/19 9:33 AM, Matthew Gibson wrote:
>> My parents have been cleaning out their home and came across some 3
>> 1/2 inch floppy disks, they also found some 5 inch floppies. Does
>> anyone have an appropriate drive for either of these media items?


I think I have a 3.5" floppy drive in the junk drawer. I don't know if
it works; the last time I used it was over a decade ago. Many
motherboards still have a floppy drive connector, but I don't know
whether modern power supplies include the connector for a 3.5" drive.
5.25" drives were obsolete in the 1990s, so that may be more difficult.
Also note that there are USB 3.5" floppy drives, though these only work
with disks that had standard formatting (80 tracks, 2 heads, 18
sectors/track). Tom's RootBoot used 82 tracks and 21 sectors/track, but
Tom's is in the dustbin of history now that everything can boot from
USB.

On 2019-01-06 17:39, Jim wrote:
> How old are these discs?  If you do get data from them, I'm sure some
> of us would be interested in how old they are and still able to retain
> the data.


This depends greatly on the quality of the media. Some floppies were
much more robust than others.

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