What is the latest hardware that can support internal 5.25 Floppy correctly

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scharfshutze009

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I want to say I can support 5.25 inch floppy correctly on the latest hardware or just in general for once, but I don't have an internal 5.25 Floppy Disk drive yet at the moment and you might ask why would I even want something that old let alone still support it, which the answer is that I just do for backwards compatibility to support any situation requiring something that old. However, will a 5.25 Floppy drive work with an Intel Core 2 system or AMD equivalent that last supported 34-pin floppy cable at all or will I have to resort to use an older Intel or AMD compatible system, like say maybe a Pentium 4 socket 478, Pentium III socket 370 Tualatin or Coppermine, or older as in Pentium II Overdrive for socket 8, Socket 7 for Pentium with MMX or non MMX, and last but not least Socket 3 based systems with a Pentium Overdrive that I can't seem to get any media to successfully install or boot an Operating System to because of bad Floppy or just I/O controllers in general.

The last draw is a Unisys 486 low insertion force socket system that currently has a 486 DX2 processor, but might get an upgrade to a Pentium Overdrive eventually and that just had the motherboard with a bad trace replaced with a motherboard with similar problems that had to be trace hopped around with wires or whatever you call what the seller did to fix the board I haven't tried to power on yet as well as still need to transfer the cache chips from the old board to the new board with chip pliers.

I know magnetic storage support needs to end eventually too, but I just want to continue to support it long enough to help others migrate away from it if they can regardless if support for it might not ever officially end somehow. Try not to ridicule as a lot of older motherboards still require use of 3.5 Floppy disks just to flash the BIOS because flashing from CD-ROM or Flash media storage either wasn't possible or as easy. As for what purpose I would need 5.25 Floppy support for once again I basically just want support for it because it is the oldest portable storage media I know of and I far back I want to go considering it's probably the farthest back I can go to support with possibly any modern or more modern system I have or will have.
 
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As far as pc hardware that supports the 5.25 drives I think you are not going to get much further than like original athlon 64 and pentium 3 systems. Later systems usually would only support the 3.5 inch floppy disks. I remember trying to figure this out a few years ago and from memory that was about as far as you could go.

syncopied said:
a quick look online shows that with the right adapters modern systems can still support 5.25 inch floppy drives: ie http://www.deviceside.com/
Click to expand...

If you just need read support that thing actually works well although it's a little weird in how it works. You use the included software to make an image of the floppy disk and then use a disk image program to mount the image so you can pull files off it(in a way this is good as you can read non pc formatted disks and open them).

I bought one a few years ago for use with a client. Social Security was claiming he hadn't paid in through part of the 80s. He handed me a pile of floppy disks from then and I was able to recover financial spreadsheets that showed he had. We had to get the latest version of lotus notes(with support for xp sp2) which ran on windows 7 and I had to convert the 80's lotus files but it did work. At the time I told the client he had to pay for the floppy drive and controller which I was keeping no matter what. If I couldn't get what he needed we wouldn't charge for labor. Overall I was happy with the hardware.
 
I still have a working USB 3.5" floppy drive, haven't used it in many years.

Not since I had to load RAID drivers during an OS install I'm sure.
Thumb drives usually work fine for that now if needed.

I can't imagine trying to get a 5.25" floppy drive working or why you'd want to.

And I don't miss the days of corrupt and unreliable floppy disks at all. lol

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