OMG! I've forgotten just how noisey those drives used to be... at least it works! Great Experiment.

Added 2 years later, but still worth to be mentioned: You can use the described device compilation at least to read and write 720KB 5.25" floppy diskettes, e.g. using a modified TEAC FD55GFV or a TEAC FD55FV. These 720KB formatted 5.25" QD or DD diskettes were not commonly used, but existed. To read/write them on an older PC (e.g. an Intel 486 PC), you have to use not only MSDOS, but additionally also a small utility (the diskette copier software VGACOPY contained the utility named "VGAREAD", but there were also an utility which came with FDFORMAT named "FDREAD" and another one which was named "800"). To format them, you can also use the FORMAT program with the command line parameter /T:80 /N:9 (not with Windows, but DOS).

Seria interesante hacer lo mismo pero con un floppy zx spectrum o Amstram con caja, alimentación externa y USB

I suspect it's identity as a 3.5" drive is flashed into the firmware of the usb board. Accessing it via the bios to boot of it probably ignores that and uses some older, lower level way to determine that which Windows does not. It would be very interesting to see what it does under Linux. I built something similar myself using a Greaseweazle board (similar to Kryofkux, less expensive and open source) and an old SCSI enclosure and one of those 5.25/3.5" combo drives. Like you said, it's not a native experience, it only works through an app that reads and writes images. BUT it does have advantages too. I was able to rescue the data off an old 3.5" disc that was damaged and otherwise unreadable. Also it can read many non pc formats.

Set up a reflective or white dot, if one does not exist, on the bottom of the drive spindle flywheel. Aim a cheap harbor freight strobe-type tachometer up to it. Run it in dos correctly, and again in windows. Note the speeds. I think what you are running into is the drive rpm speed, which is different for 3.5" drives, and between different 5.25" formats. I'll bet you windows is trying to run the drive at 360rpm instead of 300rpm or visa-versa. A 1.2mb drive in dos with the bios correctly configured does this switching automagically, but without being told to do so I bet windows is stuttering. Being able to read the fat on that one disk, but nothing else kinda also makes me think this - the phase shift from being the wrong speed is likely exaggerated as you move down the disk. The FAT exists in the first block, with a backup copy at the last block of the filesystem. Are you picking up what I'm throwing down?

Thank you *very* much for researching and sharing your findings and demo; it inspired me to try similarly. I have successfully booted from a 5.25" connected via USB, using a similar external 3.5" drive with a USB97CFDC-MN chip. My successful result and this video is thanks to your work. I have some more ideas en route, too. 😉 kzbin.info/www/bejne/mGG2nWmYrq-Xiac

One thing about technology from that era. The jumpers on the control boards were very important. They enabled or disabled certain feature sets in the device and you have to make sure you know what the jumpers are what they mean and what features you need to turn on and off. It usually looks like two pins straight up with little plastic box between them sometimes two pins sometimes three pins sometimes four and they were usually labeled one through four or ABCD.

Getting modern machines to read 3,5'' floppies is a trifle, 5,25'' though is really tricky. But there are motherboards that let you run Windows 10 while supporting 5,25'' floppies easily

in theory, it should work fine on DOS and win xp .. w7 and later doesn't have a 5.25 device drivers built in (i think). also 5.25 (it draws a lot of current @12vdc) better use external PC PSU for it..

What a fucking waste of time that would be.

get a kryoflux adapter, it supports a wide variety of floppy drives, 5.25", 3.5" and I think even 8"?

Here's a newer related video you might find useful, although it tests under Linux, not Windows, so I don't know what Windows would do with it: kzbin.info/www/bejne/nnqQaXyratqdj5Y

Here's a newer related video you might find useful, although it tests under Linux, not Windows, so I don't know what Windows would do with it: kzbin.info/www/bejne/nnqQaXyratqdj5Y

Upgrade windows 10 to the latest version it normally helps

Maybe try it under an older Windows like 98 or XP or linux ?

Can you call the makers of your 3.5" USB Floppy Drive and suggest a 5.25" USB Floppy adapter version? You proved the principle; now it just need the right microcode.

Hallo. Wenn ich es richtig gesehen habe, müsstest du Deutscher sein. Darf ich dich fragen, woher du kommst? Ich möchte dich etwas zu diesem Video fragen. Grundsätzlich muss ich den Inhalt ein paar 5,25-Zoll-Disketten wiederherstellen (also kopieren), und vielleicht könntest du mir irgendwie helfen, natürlich gegen Bezahlung. Ich könnte dir die Disketten per Post schicken. Mit freundlichen Grüßen aus Österreich.

Hello ! very good job !!! Could you build one for me and I buy it from you ?

I knew from the start anyone claiming this to be impossible was full of crap. If they meant impossible with existing hardware/software, fine - but there's 0 reason someone couldn't write a controller for a 5.25" drive with, for example, a raspberry pi pico.

10:50 I wouldn't be so sure about that - Windows may not have different icons for each disk size 🤔

Time to pay for a USB 5.25in Floppy disk drive and some disks with it.

There is KyroFlux floppy drive controller - supports all types of drives and can read disks by sampling magnetic flux... add capacitor and who knows what is possible with this device. Too bad generic 3.5" USB controller doesn't work. Kyro is hard to get and would probably cost fortune. Idea to use enclosure for 5.25 inch drive - brilliant!

So the answer to the question “Will it work?” is “Yes, but not the way you want-yet.” 💾

Use B????

when you realise a 5.25 floppy drive icon exist negatively on windows 10 and 11

Without any digging into it, I'd have to assume that the drive controller and windows do a usb handshake that initializes it as a 3.5 disk drive. If you can fake out the handshake to be a 5.25 inch drive somehow them it will likely work natively. Perhaps that is why booting to it works, since the drive controller might have a separate primitive control function when accessed via bios.

So what's the drive you used

Have you tried it under Linux or MacOS?

Am building the exact same configuration with now with a 1.2 MB 5.25" TEC drive. Have you figured out a method to get this working as a 5.25" drive in Windows yet?

Have you tried running windows 3.1 inside dosbox? I have a usb 3.5 floppy disk drive that I am able to read and write on using this method. I had to mount the A drive in msdos. I have purchased a 5.25 drive and a grease weasel adapter. I'm hoping to build something very similar to yours. Looks like fun to see if I can get it working

From my understanding with usb floppy drives. The computer will read each disk just fine. The problem is that newer os has some sort of media header that's written on removable storage whereas older os didn't require it. If that header isn't present, the pc will prompt you to format the disk. This may stem from the fact that some disks came "pre-formatted" and others were formatted via pc. If you read reviews from any 3.5 usb floppy, you'll see where some people claim that it didn't work for them. Or at the very least, only read some disks. The original formatting method may be the cause. Your usb device may work but you will probably need to install an older os. Try to Google for a pc that contained both a 5.25 and 3.5 to see which os it ran. Then look to see if that os supported usb. If successful, either install that os on a seperate hdd partition or swap the hdd and install it. Windows xp may be your best bet

Well I think I know why this does not work. The floppy cable itself does not provide any means to detect the drive type. Floppy drives are extremely dumb devices in fact. So the controller board in your USB device has no idea that it should talk to a 5.25 instead of a 3.5. Neither does a PC floppy controller know this. This is why this must be manually set in the BIOS for a real floppy controller. For the USB version, the chip must support the drive type and has to be configured accordingly. I guess the errors with your too long file can be explained as the 3.5" floppy has a different track geometry than the 5.25". Namely the "sectors per track" differs. On DOS, it was 18 for 3.5 and 15 for 5.25. If I remember correctly, the FAT12 stores logical sector numbers, not track/head/sector information. As your controller board assumes a higher sectors/track number than there actually is on the 5.25 disk, it will run into an error trying to map the logical sector into a physical one. It will work fine of course at the beginning of the track. I'm not too deep into floppies anymore, but I think the actual encoding used on the magnetic track was the same, although written with a different "resolution" by the heads. Your DOS program cannot "detect" the drive type as well as it is not possible. I assume they either refer to some (possibly undocumented) DOS structure that remembered the FAT setup for the last disk it read or they try to read it themselves.

The reason issues exists comes form differences by those two drives, 5.25 HD floppy spins at 360rpm and have less sectors per track that 3.5 floppy, 3.5" drive spins at 300rpm, the controller thinks you still have 3.5" drive connected and it kind of a stroke of luck that you could read any disks at all. You propably could have more success by fixing the speed at 300rpm and formatting it as 1.44MB disk.

Hey, @DOSpedition when you'll add a new video? Previous two was quite interesting!

Hi. I have old 5.25 floppy drive I'm tring to use on linux over usb. I'll let you know my results.

My question: do you have an xp machine you could attach it to and try that instead? My thinking is that xp still supported 5.25 inch floppy drives.

Is it possible to buy a similar product anywhere? I am looking but I can't find it.

I want a 5.25" usb floppy drive which I can use like my 3.5" usb floppy drive. But to copy X68000 images (they use 5.25" HD floppies) to via UBUNTU (running thru vm in windows) via, UFIFORMAT. Where can I buy one? Can you make me one of these? Could you please test your solution in Windows while running Virtual Box with Ubuntu and mount the USB drive to ubuntu and see how it works there?

is it work for old usb 2.0

I think the Bios doesn't really care about the USB descriptor in the controller board. It just delivers an interface and the detection of the floppy structure is done by the DOS itself. It looks at the mediadescriptor ( = 0xF9) in the bootsector of the disk. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_of_the_FAT_file_system#BIOS_Parameter_Block) On the other hand, I think that Windows decides from the information in the USB controller board that this is a 3.5 inch disk and assumes the layout from there. Because there are some differences in actual layout of a formatted floppy, it probably fails to read the fat correctly. I am not sure of windows 10/11 even has knowledge about 5,25 disks. I am curious what happens when you try to format a floppy using this drive. Does it (try to) format it with 1.44MB capacity? It can be done. I had software for DOS in the old days that could stuff 1,44 MB on a 5,25 inch floppy. If Windows 10 does still support 5,25 inch disks, than it might be possible to do some registry hack on in the devices hive somewhere to get it to work.

¡¡¡Simply, AWESOME!!!!

I am your 666 subscriber 🤘 🔥 ❤️

Probier doch mal die Floppy auf ein 3.5'' Format zu formatieren (z.B. mit 720kb.exe) , ob er es dann in Windows erkennt. Ansonsten würde mich eine "Nahaufnahme" des getweakten Kabels interessieren.

When usb floppies first came on the scene a bunch of us did the 5.25 hack, i am surprised this is considered new

Does the 5.25” USB floppy drive work with Commodore 64 5.25” floppy disks? Does it work with the C64 Mini and C64 Maxi?

KZbin has a video connecting an 8" drive to a pc.

I’m sure someone else has posted this, however the chipset in the USB drive you took the PCB from very likely, if not definitely, does not support 360K drives/media. Some chips support a 1.2MB format, which was popular in Japan on 31/2 inch drives, however 360K has been a known showstopper with this method.

Have you tried reading the disk with winimage? I can't consistently read even 3.5 in disks in Win10 anymore, but Winimage is still able to read them just fine. Also, even XP has issues reading 5.25 in disks using an integrated floppy controller, so I'm surprised Win10 is able to get as far as it is.

I tried something similar a couple years ago on Mac OS X, but I ran into similar problems. I think the 5.25 drives need a custom USB adapter board, and not the standard one used for 3.5 inch disks. Hopefully, some hobbyist will make such an adapter some day!

I have a question can you use setmul in Windows 3.1 dos sessions?