Old Hardware

[Matt Graham]

> 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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