Floppies?

Yesterday I was cleaning out some boxes that I had stored forever and I discovered about 20 floppy disks (the 3x5's) tucked away and forgotten until now. I would have just thrown them out, but when I looked at the labels they contained pictures that I would love to have as well as a number of essays I wrote about a million years ago and wouldn't mind revisiting.

So is there any way of getting the info off those floppies short of raiding Grandma's attic and making off with her old computer that still has slots for floppies? Or are those disks just doomed to go to the landfill west of town without me ever to look at their content?

Most computer repair shops would be able to access the contents and transfer to a cd for you I'd think.

or there's that...lol

Hey thanks Jim! Interesting site. Reminds me of the people who still love vinyl LP's.

jimhelm;819218 wrote:

http://floppydisk.com/usb.htm

Looks nice, but how do you know if Sam has a Dell? There are a good number of stores that sell external diskette drives in a wide range of brands.

Shouldn't matter. Usb plug and play

•spoken in to my phone

jimhelm;819225 wrote:

Shouldn't matter. Usb plug and play

•spoken in to my phone

Maybe. It's branded as a Dell drive tho. That kinda threw me off.

BTW, now I get that "spoken into my phone" thing. I'm guessing your phone has a speech2text component.

yeah... not as cool as Limey's though transference, but pretty convenient just the same.

mail them to me. I have such a usb/3.5 inch floppy drive. I'll download the contents and email them back to you.

or maybe the local fedex store could do such a task for you. $$

How about 5.25 inch drives?

Happy Monkey;819239 wrote:

How about 5.25 inch drives?

I have a few of those too, but none that are usb/floppy. Does that answer your question?

I'd have to resurrect the machine(s) that has a 5.25 drive, and then plug in a usb drive as the destination, carry the usb drive to a "modern" computer and proceed as before.

8 inch? Now that is major old school.

I used to have a pair of those eight inch drives as an external unit. I traded them for a BetaMax professional VCR years and years ago.

Pam

I have a running Compaq Presario w/3.5 drive installed.

You can use 5.25" drives in modern pcs as long as they have a floppy connector. My dell optiplex 320 has a floppy connector on it. I have used them under xp. I will see if it works with another os today. Seriously.

Some motherboards support them.

Dell, unfortunately,mdoes not.

However, this does:

http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html

This will let you read those disks on windows.

John R. Sellers;819319 wrote:

8 inch? Now that is major old school.

No longer have the drive. Still have a few 8" floppies.

tw;819647 wrote:

No longer have the drive. Still have a few 8" floppies.

Clever guy. :lol:

The lesson is make copies of the files you care about when switching to a new computer. Duh. Two or three computers ago I had one that had both a slot for floppies and a CD rom drive. Should have converted those floppies then. Oh well.

jimhelm;819688 wrote:

We're talking about floppies, not a cure for floppiness.

:lol2:

no, I'm pretty sure we were talking about the latter. tw is very subtle when he works blue.

Well said, jim. He's very funny. :)

Oh, and: Major Old School (casual salute)