[TVARC] 3.5 inch floppy drive

[Larry Sheridan]

Interesting project, will have to look in some boxes in the garage, just
may not be able to get to it today though.

On Thu, Jan 16, 2025 at 10:25 AM Tim Leonard <tfleonard at pacbell.net> wrote:

> 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 specify
> 720K 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  K8XR
> 307-630-5697
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> 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.
>
> Tim
> AA6DQ
> .
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