[TVARC] 3.5 inch floppy drive

[Tim Leonard]

 Hi Larry,
Long explanation: 

Basically I am working with an old PC/AT Pentium motherboard, power supply, IDE drive and and sdcard-to-IDE board.  My CDROM is DOA and every "surplus" one that I have tried also has problems reading burned CD's so I decided to try to find a working floppy drive and cable.  My USB CD and USB floppy would work great but the bios on my board does not boot or read USB and the DOS USB driver is not very stable.   

The reason for all this is that I am writing software for "the bare metal" provided by the PC rather than design another 8088 or 80386 board.  There are many old perfectly serviceable pc motherboards out there that can be repurposed for projects.  They all have a basic bios and DOS is the easiest way to load and debug bare metal software.  I have done it with Linux in the past but the latest versions of Linux place too much of a dependency on modern hardware aka USB and ATA.  Unfortunately, most of the sdcard-to-ide boards have issues with editing files with DOS so a floppy is the easiest way to load test programs.  Making a DOS bootable sdcard is easy using Virtualbox but making a DOS bootable IDE drive requires either a CDROM or a floppy.  

So, if you have a 3.5 inch floppy drive that you would like to get rid of let me know.  I will be at the meeting tonight.  .

Tim


   On Wednesday, January 15, 2025 at 10:09:23 PM EST, Larry Sheridan <larry10782 at gmail.com> wrote:  
 
 
Hi Tim:
Pretty sure that I've got a 3.5" floppy, dual-drive data cable and dual-drive power cable here for you, you didn't specify720K or 1.44M but may have both in a box.
IIRC, also have a couple 5-1/4" floppy drives in 360K & 1.2M sizes with cables, too.
I do have a tower PC available with all 4 floppy drive sizes in it, that can run any 2 floppys at a time, specifically for reading old floppy disks to a hard drive for data recovery if anyone has a need for that, an oldie but a goodie keeper.   
I'd have to look but might also still have a copy of the program COCO2PC which will read floppy disks from the Radio Shack CoCo Color Computer disk format to the standard PC floppy format.
Larry Sheridan  K8XR307-630-5697






On Wed, Jan 15, 2025 at 8:52 PM Tim Leonard <tfleonard at pacbell.net> wrote:

Does anyone have a 3.5 inch floppy drive they would like to get rid of?  I am looking for the PC/AT version to use with an old Intel Pentium motherboard. 
I also need the floppy disk ribbon cable.  

TimAA6DQ.  
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