The company I work for has a collection of data on about 250 old 5.25" floppies. What we would like to do is get this data off the floppies and onto a hard drive so they can be burned to CD, so the space-occupying floppies can be junked.
The problem is that none of our computers are old enough to have 5.25" floppy drives, and such drives are becoming very hard to find.
Does anyone know of any resources that will allow us to retrieve this data?
How valuable is this data for you? If you still store it on floppy disks it seems you did not need it for a long time.
Check computer repair stores, they should still have that drive.
I told the company the same thing, recommending that they just toss out the disks. And the data on it is not important in my mind, but the company still wants it.
You suggest buying a drive and installing it on a computer at work? Can this be done with newer motherboards?
Check if you can do it in the repair shop or let them do it for you. Depends how confidential the data is.
As many companies tend to get rid of their old hardware by donating it to schools you can try there as well.
Ask your kid or tell your coworkers to check with their kids schools.
250 disks? Geez that is going to take a while.
Will all fit on one CD too, amazing really.
If it has a floppy controller it should still support the old 5.25" drives. I have seen a few motherboards without a floppy controller, but most still have one. Finding a drive is going to be the hardest part of the exercise.
You can probably get old floppy drives at Greentec on Bade Road, Taibei.
綠盟3C資訊廣場
台北市八德路一段29號2樓
2nd Floor, No. 29, Section 1, Bade Road, Taibei City
Web site: www.greentec.com.tw
I doubt all the data will be retrievable. Magnetic media deteriorate with time.
there are IBM notebook external floppy drives that connects via USB 1.1. on the rare occasions i need a floppy drive for the macbook, that one works seamlessly. slow, but functional.
as well as other brands around. the driver issue should be minimal… oh, you’ve probably got windows. oh well, good luck. they should be dirt cheap.
you should be able to get all your floppy data on to one CD. have fun!
Those are 3.5" drives though. Or at least I’ve never seen a 5.25" USB floppy drive.
oh, duh, my bad. hey, its been eons since i even saw one of those, let alone thought about using one! my apologies: the word ‘floppy’ was what i saw, not the size…
yes, you are kind of stuck there… if you do find a drive, it sounds like a school holiday project for some employee’s kid to earn a few bucks.
[quote=“urodacus”]oh, duh, my bad. hey, its been eons since i even saw one of those, let alone thought about using one! my apologies: the word ‘floppy’ was what i saw, not the size…
yes, you are kind of stuck there… if you do find a drive, it sounds like a school holiday project for some employee’s kid to earn a few bucks.[/quote]
I was going to point out that the OP is talking about those floppies that really are floppy, not those ones that just snap. 