An external 5¼" floppy drive for almost any vintage PC 

Happy Thanksgiving, VWestlife

That lawyer software was so comforting with it's friendly suggestions, 'usually YES', 'usually NO'. So nice.

....hands up all those that would pay to have USB 5.25 inch drive!

Some clever engineering to use the parallel port like that. Always love old or obscure accessories

"It was just working!! ... .... ok now it works.." Oh man, hah. Reminds me of loading games from DOS all too well. Thank you for the video! :)

I miss Radio Shack. They were around for decades. You could always head on down to your local shack and almost always get what you needed. Try doing that at Best Buy, ain't gonna happen. Another cool video Kevin. 😎👍

The drive noise flooded me with memories. Took me back to 88. Enjoyed the video, sir.

Happy Thanksgiving VWest, I hope you have a great day.

I love it! I have a proprietary 360KB external drive for my 1000 HX, this is a much better option. Thanks for covering this in depth.

I chuckled at the Windows 10 wallpaper on Windows 98 anachronism!

Great find, now we need a 5 1/4" external for modern PC's. :-)

Now I'm obsessed with trying to get the drive to work on the RL! Thank you for this wonderful video and hope you and your family had a wonderful Thanksgiving. 🦃

You can cobble one together with a lot of external tape drives (floppy controller based)! I've done it in a pinch. Backpack and adaptec used standard floppy controller s just need the floppy driver.

actually very useful. happy thanksgiving :)

Another memory jogger for me! Loved hearing the old dot matrix printer just as I did the modem you used some time back.

My experience was quite different with 5.25" disks. I've only ever encountered a handful of them that failed in all my years using them back to the 80s. I've even come across warped ones that I removed the magnetic disk from and put in another plastic shell that worked fine. 3.5" on the other hand....I had so many that failed. The 360K 5.25" seem rock solid though.

🎵I like small PC's and I cannot lie...🎵

I used to carry a floppy binder back in the day. This stuff makes me so grateful for modern solid state storage. All my floppy data fit on a single 64MB USB stick with room to spare, so nice. Oh, and the speed; USB version 1 was unreal fast compared to floppies.

That keyboard makes such a unique sound. I've restored several of them.

It's so nostalgic hearing the floppy disk loading up :) I never had a 5.25 drive for a normal PC, only for the Commodore 64.

I am going to leave a bunch of these to my daughter and granddaughters and I hope they understand how to use it . They'll get what looks like Computer Reset's collection .

Very cool! I've recently become obsessed with parallel port devices such as this one, such an ingenious use of the good old LPT port. And with devices such as OPL2LPT I kinda feel the LPT port is gaining new life and almost becoming the PC equivalent of the ZX Spectrum edge connector. The retro homebrew community should come up with the concept of some sort of expandable bus you can plug into the LPT port, I'm sure we'd see all sorts of compatible devices suddenly pop up

Mans bringing people back to the 1980's I love it!

great vid VW, reminds me of my old Apple II with 2 external 5.25-inch drives-back in the days before HDs & IDE, you had to load DOS into RAM before you could use the disk drive to load the BASIC programs, so if you only had 1 external drive, you booted up the DOS disk into RAM. Once you were booted into DOS, you removed the DOS boot disk & then inserted the program disk you wanted to run. Sounds tedious, but remember we were originally using cassette tape recorders for storage so this was a huge leap. The next step was adding a 2nd 5.25-inch drive, this allowed you to leave the DOS boot disk in drive A, boot up into DOS, then just put the program disk in drive B to run it. This was bleeding edge in the early 80s...

Wow - such great fun! Bring back the good old days. But so many people, these days, have never experienced an 'older' pc runnng dos - blistering performance. Just shows that perhaps, windows is not really a progression. Love your video - thanks!

Oh man, hearing "terminator resistors" in over 30 years gave me chills. Amazing how far we came with hardware and software... no more terminating resistors (or at least they are built in and software defined). hehe

Nice drive. For a smal PC with a 5 1/4 the pride of my collection is a Commodore PC-1 - a tiny PC with a 5 1/4 built in. (has an external 3 1/2 using an Amiga interface) First PC I had.

Gotta love that compaq. Had one for years when i was 10-12 years old. My dad trash picked one. Completely soaked. Let to dry for 3 days. Blew it clean with air compressor and worked perfectly.

Happy Thanksgiving Kevin!

This is a quality video, thank you for including everything about the backpack!

Oh, very nice! That's certainly a very useful drive. Nice that it's not Tandy specific too!

the t20 was my first laptop I owned. sufed the web on that bad boy til 06😎

7:50: I have a lot of HD 5,25" floppy disks. The reason is simple: in 1992, 5,25" HD disks were significantly cheaper than 3,5" HD floppy disks, and had about 80 % of the capacity.

My first floppy drive.

The last time I used a 5 and a quarter floppy diskette drive was a apple 2E computer in elementary school when I was 7.

An interesting external LPT drive. LPT port was truly the USB port of it's day with all kind of peripherals made for it, from storage devices to sound cards. From a quick look at that bridge PCB, I think a 12V DC supply would have most likely worked as well for that drive. An AC brick was used likely because it was cheaper.

You make me miss my old 110CS with your 105CS I had it from 1998-2003

I always thought it was ironic that the maximum number of attached diskette drives went down (after starting at four with the PC) even as the capacities of the diskettes got larger. For the PS/2s, IBM had the "Data Migration Facility" to convert from 5-1/4" format (on another system with that drive type) to 3-1/2" through the parallel port, and also had the 4869-001 (360Kb) external 5-1/4" drive that ran from the primary FDC on the planar. Third-party manufacturers made ribbon cable and "bridge" assemblies for the PS/2s that didn't require the pass-through PCBs to be in adapter slots and bays. So then IBM made the "Diskette Adapter/A", which had a separate FDC chip, but could only run one additional drive per connection (internal and external) - but also at least supported the 4869-002 (1.2Mb) external drive (I did a video on all that too, and was told I needed to be more "scripted" in the single comment that someone else did). There were external diskette drives for the initial Thinkpads laptops and tablets using special connectors, as some of the other manufacturers did as well. Other manufacturers did have the parallel port and later USB models, but those moved from using an FDC chip inside the system. I can't really figure out why more recent systems still with an FDC just support one drive.

brings back memories from my childhood!

Awesome video! Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

Here in Europe, high density 5,25" floppies are much easier to find than 360k ones. They were still in use during early 90s.

The DaynaFile was a SCSI 5.25 Floppy Drive for Macintosh and NexT computers.

Dang, I remember playing The Oregon Trail across multiple floppies.

This reminds me of the photo portrait studio's IBM XT (20MB HDD, 512K monochrome display card, 5.25 inch FDD), that I used for simple database and word processing via PFS: ProFile and ProWrite.;) Eventually, the 20MB HDD died, so I "revved it up" to a 40MB HDD, 640K half length color display card, GeoWorks 1.0 and 1.2, Xtree Gold, and a bootleg dBase program.

Clint (LGR) would've loved this piece of hardware!

I got one of those Tandy 25-1087 drives with my Tandy 1000 RSX. Still have the original driver disk too! I piggybacked my external Zip-100 into it. I didn't know about the NONSTOP switch though. That will come in handy.

Thanks for improving my thanksgiving!

Loved those backpack drives. My dad got some different ones from worked in the 90s when they were getting rid of them. That's one of those items I kick myself for getting rid of.

Great Video as always! I bought a Backpack Bantam a long time ago. It has been quite a useful drive to load files and programs on a PC with no CDROM. I still see them on Ebay. I wouldn't mind one more as a spare if this one ever croaks.

First sentence...instant thumbs UP!

Microsolutions Backpack solutions are the best thing you can get for old PC's. I have the Backpack 460mb Hard Drive and I had the Tape Drive which failed, so I swapped it with a 3.5" floppy drive. Use them both with my PS/2 Model P70. The Parallel port HD is faster than the internal DBA hard drive is!

Although this is of little direct use for me, as back in the late 89es/earliest 90es I only used a DOS PC (w. both 3½" and 5¼" drives) as a means to move data between my CP/M machine and Macs, I like it; and I loved hearing the buzz of the Oki µLine92 printer again, what a beautiful sound.

our family 286 was our first PC and it came with 1,2 and 1,44mb High Density drives. I still bought a lot of 5 1/4 disks because those were cheaper and my parents would only supply me with a certain amount of 3'5 inch ones, never enough for my growing appetite for more software. So I had to buy extras with my own pocket money, and 1'2 inch ones were indeed becoming obsolete and much cheaper,

takes me back to the days of my first PC, an 8088 based clone

Great video as always, if someone wants information about such a disk drive, he will find everything in this video. Now... 3.5" diskettes were a disaster, totally unreliable, especially the ones made in the 90s. I used some for backup, never used them for months, then when I needed them, they simply didn't work. On the other hand, the 360K 5.25" ones were surprisingly reliable, in total contrast with what one would expect. Virtually all of my 5.25" diskettes still work today.... I got older (and it shows), they did not xD

excellent video...

Note that the parallel port on the planar of IBM PS/2s and other systems can be a strange I/O address (03BCh) to be an issue sometimes - the parallel port ZIP drives had this come up (I know of someone that even went to great lengths to add a second parallel port to a PS/2 Model 25) all the time until the workaround is learned.

About your faulty 1.2MB 5.25" diskettes. Since we're in the era of a magnetic layer glued to a Mylar/plastic surface, I'd bet that it's a matter of factory chosen binder material along with long term durability, just like with certain makers of cassette-, R2R- and videotapes, where some are prone to loose the magnetic layer more than others. So grasping for straws in the middle of the Pacific, I wonder if other manufactorers made better 1.2MB diskettes than your Maxell turned out to be. Maybe there's better out there. There should be. I like your channel. It's my preferred one. You're always right on target. There's no nonsense. No "talking hands a'la puppet master doing ballet" (man, I hate that). So. Cheers.

Happy Thanksgiving Vwestlife.

What I wonder is if you could take one of those external USB 3.5" floppy drives and connect a 5.25" drive to that USB controller to see if it would work on a modern PC. Thanks for the videos!

Really cool!

Good info thanks. I have a Unisys slimline 386. If I had such a device I could use a removable hard drive in its place. It only has one externally accessible drive bay.

Thank you, you made me remind thouse days.

The moving sights (movies) and talking sounds (talkies) take me back to the 1980s. We now needs the smellies! P.S. I had few errors with 1.2MB and 1.44MB floppies back in the day (but it was new equipment). Hey, it beat 76KB on a single-sided 8-inch floppy, and you haven't lived until you toggle in a bootloader for cassette tape to load Bill Gates' BASIC.

That lawyer software had me cracking up LOL! Format that sucker.

I have one of these old external drives.

Nice video. Missed the sound of floppy drives and dotmatrix printers.

Happy Thanksgiving vwestlife ( Kevin), I saved a 5.25 drive from a old pc that was messed up. Its from a gateway that was a 286sx( I believe) computer. I believe its made by epson beacuse the 3.5 floppy is. Both are all metal construction internally which is great vs the 3.5 I had that was made from 2006 while the ones I have are from 1992. I have found 3.5 floppies brand new at goodwill 5.25 not at all but ive yet to use it.

I think it's great you use PC-DOS. I used it during the waning years of DOS. It had a create memory manager that MS-DOS lacked, and MS's issue with IP theft just really bothered me. I had a Tandy 1000 RLX. It was a nightmare machine, as the hard drive was a weird XT IDE drive that had its own BIOS. The RLX did not recognize ANY IDE drive except either the 20 or 40MB Seagate IDE with BIOS. So I was stuck with 40MB. What was interesting was MS-DOS 5.0 was installed on a ROM drive as D:. The benefit was the OS did not consume valuable hard drive space, and it was faster. When I gave the computer to my brother, our dad installed a later MS-DOS which consumed a large chunk of the drive. I would have just kept it running 5.0.

Some of the 1980s computer I used only had a one directional parallel port. I found out after I tried using a parallel Zip drive on my computer.

I have a backpack 3.5" floppy drive and a backpack CD-ROM drive, both of which I've repaired and gotten working - but I've been searching for a backpack 5.25" floppy drive for a LONG TIME! And for anyone who's curious, no, you cannot simply connect a standard 1.2MB 5.25" floppy drive to the internals of the 3.5" backpack box and get the parts talking - this was a failed project of mine.

Awesome! Didnt know about the nonstop option. I've been using my tandy external drive on my 1000SX and TX machines. I was surprised to find out that high density disks were supported!

Happy Thanksgiving

I'm supposed to be changing my daughters vehicle oil right now...it can wait.

I have a couple of Quad-Density 5.25" drives, you can use them on a PC set up as a 720k 3.5", the comptuer will know no better, but I mainly got them to use as 5.25" 880k drives with my Amiga, because I want to be different-ish... :P

Multicamera! Can't remember seeing that in your videos before. As always, an enjoyable and informative video.

I'm curious to see what the whole adapter board looks like. I'd guess it has some jumpers which are used to identify the drive. Changing them could probably turn it into a Backpack drive or a 360k drive.

5 and a quarter floppy disks go brrrr! 😂

What a treasure trove

Happy Thanksgiving bud!

0:01 -- Nice Compaq Deskpro EN you got there dude.. I got one and instantly crammed (initially) a Asus a320i-k w/ AMD a10-9700.. and now it has a ASRock Phantom x570 ITX inside and got a AMD Ryzen 7 5700G

Great find, still no 5.25 disk drive with usb connection and probably never will..

I used to have a ton of Memorex 3.5" see through floppies in multiple colors. I did use one as a back up for Windows 98 SE about 21 years ago. Unfortunately I don't have an external 3.5 inch drive to see if it still works.

This is some of the fancier video editing you've done! It came out nice! Does this drive work with Imagedisk? It seems like runs at about the same speed as a normally connected drive.

Curious....did you try a drive letter other than B? I never seen a floppy controller that only supported one drive only. Even if it only had one connector (like the Compaq) you needed a special cable with a twist and sometimes some pins removed. I had an external Tandy drive and I think mine was high lettered >c. When you wanted to make it primary it would make it A but then the 3.5 went high. Of course this was the Tandy drive, so it was special. P.s. funny coincidence you break out a 5.25 drive now! I'm retrobriting my apple //e floppy drives today! Happy Thanksgiving 2021

I would also like to see a count of how many computers you have. Working/nonwork

Thanks for the upload! :)

I never saw the problem - I moved all my 5.25 data to 3.5 inch disks, and later, to a GoTek floppy. You only have to do it once ;)

I can smell those disks just by looking at them.

This looks eerily similar to the external 5.25" drive that commodore used to sell. I had one with my PC-I back in teh day; probably the only noticable difference is the 23 pin vs. the 25 pin plug.

that was also my experience. i lost a bunch of games on 3.5. my 5.25 pretty much still work fine.

I'd love to get my hands on a metal drive case like that.

Turn OFF the DISKETTE CHIP SELECT from here at 6:57. The external enclosure has it's own chip select function. This maybe the issue why you were getting the freeze up since one can't talk through the other. Not sure if PARALLEL CHIP SELECT plays a role or not.

I have a similar ext drive for the Schneider Euro PC, a nifty all in one XT compatible like the Tandy 1000 EX, only better looking! ;)

I have yet to be able to wrap my head around the fact we cannot get the collective hobbyists to put together an actual working read/write 5.25 solution that reads/writes natively without images. I know the USB standard doesn't support it, but so what? There are plenty of proprietary USB devices with custom drivers etc, so what is holding back the development of an actual USB 5.25 floppy? Some say demand, but it is VERY evident (especially lately) that there is a huge demand for such a native solution. Ideally, an external shell with the pcb and power with connectors inside. USB and standard power plug on the outside. Or heck, even a brick 12v adapter would be suitable. I don't know enough to even begin, but it is obvious there are plenty of people who are.

Since 2008 I was able to purchase 5.25" and 3.5" external USB drives. As I have been informed they are still available.

Wow, this is a very handy option to have…

If you make a config.sys in windows 98 you must add the lines for himem, ifshlp, and the other device drivers listed.

My Compaq Deskpro EN PIII has both floppy sizes and works fine

They need a 3 1/2" external drives for those with old IBM's.