I've got this old Tandy 2500xl that's been out of use for a while, but I would now like to retrieve some old programs and documents from it's hard drive. This would be simple if not for one problem: the 3.5 floppy drive on it hasn't worked in years. This leads me to a few questions that you folks might can help me out with. I'm not very experienced with the technical aspects of computing, but if there's any advice you could give I would appreciate it: 1)Is there an easy way to perhaps fix the existing floppy drive? It just quit one day many years ago, and I never bothered to find out why. A couple of years ago my brother was fooling around with the drive inside the machine, and it actually started working again, only to die yet again later that night. When I try to access it by typing a:\, the light comes on but I get the "General failure reading drive a:" message. It's probably a lost cause, but if there's anything I might be able to do to fix it, or find out what's wrong with it i'd appreciate hearing it. 2) Would it be a hassle if I were to buy a new floppy and install it? Would it be as simple as just opening up the machine, unplugging the old drive and plugging in the new one? Would it be possible to find an external 3.5 floppy drive that I could simply plug into the old Tandy? 3)Is there an inexpensive method in existence to copy the data straight from this ancient Tandy to my much newer PC, a Sony Vaio? It would be great if there were a way I could connect the two and just suck the info from one onto the other. Thanks in advance for any info you might can provide.

It might just be a loose ribbon cable on the floppy drive or at the controller end. It's worth a check. There are two possibilities for taking the data off the hard drive. One, you might set it as the slave on your second IDE channel. Two, there ARE cables to run between your serial ports. Laplink uses this kind of setup, but I think Windows will do it without any extra software. I hope this helps.

As you have discovered, repairing floppy disks can be of a hit and a miss. Getting another 5.5" floppy one these day is going to be difficult. Yuu could try Ebay, see if there are any there. Taking the hard disk out an installing it in another computer seems the best choice - that is providing it has an IDE interface. If my memory serves me the Tandy 2500tx was around about the same time that IDE was introducued. Have a look at the hard disk. If it has a single ribbon cable then it is IDE. If there are two ribbon cables connected to then you are out of luck. The only way you are going to get any data out of it is by booting that computer. You could try connecting a 3.5" floppy to it. The interface were identical. If that works you will need a 3.5" disk formatted to 720K, not 1.4, with the earliest version of DOS you can find. Even if the computer does recgnise a 3.5 inchs disk, it will be unlikely to accept 1.4 Mb disks. Stuart

Check your cables and power suppy and if you need to replace it try a used computer parts store , you'll be surprized with what they may have