i need help! i wish to plug in a 5.25 and 3.5 inch drives to read some old archives. the BIOS configuration does not show 2nd floppy drive possibility. it only gives floppy drive A and allows to configure it as any one of the following five choices: 3.5" 720KB, or 1.44MB, or 2.88MB 5.25" 360KB or 1.2MB. the disks i have are: 3.5" 1.44 MB 5.25" 360KB 5.25" 1.2MB the drives i have are: 3.5" SONY model MPF920-1 5.25" IBM model YD-380 5.25" PANASONIC JU-475-5 the cable i have is a 34wire ribbon cable with three drive connectors, 1st one for a 3.5" floppy, second one a card-edge connector and 3rd one (at the end) another 3.5" floppy connector with 7-wire twist. i request for some help in getting the data off the floppy disks to the Hard disk. i am willing to plug in drives one by one if both are not possible together. you can email me at ash_4_cash@yahoo.com thanks in advance.

Ash, first of all this is a public forum and as such private responses aren't the normal way posts are handled. You will just have to be inconvienced by checking back from time to time. In the meantime posting your email address in the open as you have will get you plenty of emails though. They will be of the spam variety. Remove your email address. Now on to the question. Back in the day when A & B floppies were standard the BIOS had options to swap the A & B. This was because the A drive was connected to the far end of the cable(might be the other way around). That is how the dual controller could tell one from the other. I don't think connecting more than one at a time will work. At any rate I never saw a computer that could have 3 floppy drives installed at once. The old 5.25" is what I suggest starting with. I think many of those will be corrupted. That media didn't store very well. Can't recall if a 1.2MB drive will read 320s or not. Weren't there 720KB disks in the 5.25" series

You might check this thread where I tried to explain how to set them up: http://www.computing.net/hardware/w... Note that when using a twisted cable the DS settings should be in the second position. The 1.2 drives will read 360K disks OK. The main problem is the bios only allowing one floppy drive . Possibly with two connected the OS will see the second one anyway. You'd just have to try it and see. Otherwise you'll need to swap them.

DAVINCAPS, thanks for clearing up some of my info. Been quite awile since I ran a 5.25. Without looking it up (lazy). Can WinXP read DOS files?

XP will recognise dos files, problem may be the types of files on those disks. Any text files won't be a problem, but formatted documents will require a program capable of converting the old format. If you have MS Office it can convert most old formats for wordprocessor, spreadsheet and database, but you will need to install the extra conversion files from the cd as they aare not installed by default. A 5.25 inch 1.2meg drive can read,360kb, 640kb & 1.2meg.

You can only connect TWO floppy drives to one cable, regardless of the fact that the cable may be 3 connectors.

thanks for your guidance. i'll keep that in mind and will continue to check frequently. i do not wish to connect three drives at a time. i will be happy even if one at a time works. i have tried connecting using DS0 and DS1 positions. is there a way to check (visually / thru a software / using instrumentation) that the drive head alignment is OK / calibrated since that also directly affects readability. so far I have taken the following steps: 1. configured the BIOS that floppy is a 5.25" 1.2MB capacity drive 2. Connected the 5.25" drive at the card-edge connector with DS1 jumpered 3. Booted to WinXPSP2 4. Removed the floppy drive controller in the device manager and re-installed it. It sees a "standard floppy disk" 5. Windows explorer shows a 5.25" Drive A present (i guess as a result of BIOS settings) 6. I insert a disk in drive and try accessing it in Explorer. 7. The disk spins, drive light lits up, but system gives a message "insert a disk in drive A and click OK to continue". Same message repeats for any disk (1.2MB or 360KB). The disks i have, are in very good physical condition for 15-year old media and have been kept protected from climatic extremities and magnetic disturbances so i doubt if all disks have gone bad at the same time. However, i must mention that all 10 disks have been kept in the same box for all this time. Could this have affected the readability from the disks like what happens when you keep two credit cards back-to-back and the magnetic stripe occasionally becomes unreadable? the files i have on these disks are either simple text (emails saved as text from VAX/VMS) or word docs and may be some lotus 123 spreadsheets. nothing out of the ordinary. your continued help is greatly appreciated in advance.