Hooking up PCjr floppy drive to Windows XP machine

[pinesbrook]

Hello, I'm hoping to find help, and sincere apologies if I've missed this information elsewhere.

I am looking to back up all my old PCjr 360k floppies onto a modern machine. I have a running PCjr, pretty stock. I also have a running Windows XP machine, which seems to have a motherboard slot for a floppy drive. I took an amateur stab and hooking up my PCjr floppy drive directly to the old XP-running motherboard, but have had no luck. I still have power running to the PCjr so I assumed that would power the drive.

I set the legacy diskette option in the XP machine's BIOS to 360K, 5.25. Originally, I accidentally had it on 1.2MB, and XP would seem to see the drive ("Device is working properly", for floppy disk drive in Hardware device manager), but would ask to insert a disk in A:, though I already had a disk in there. When I corrected the BIOS to 360K, now it just says the A: drive is inaccessible due to an I/O error, though "the device is still working properly."

Am I way, way, dangerously off here? I'd love to be able to back up everything onto a modern PC (as I have a raspberry pi running DOSBox and also GW-Basic), without having to buy another used 5.25 drive (while praying it works) and/or some floppy-to-USB solution I see that are somewhat costly for this project.

Any help is appreciated! Love my PCjr!

[Chuckphd53]

I also recently revived my old Compaq Presario

I too tried to get the 5.25 drive to work, while it sees the drive, it will not read any disks..

Have not given up yet but will let you know if I get anywhere..

I also need a path to get data from new computer onto floppies,
I think the better path will be the Zip 100 drive which I have in the Presario,
so I am gonna try Palmzip and an external Zipp100 drive.

Chuck

[Hargle]

If you only care about the end result of having your floppies backed up, I will gladly volunteer to perform this task for you. I have several vintage machines that I can make images on and transferring the resulting data into the modern world is easy. The reward I get is additional copies of whatever software you have. Since I'm trying to archive all that stuff myself, having 2ndary copies from a unique source can help me be confident that the copies in the archive are correctly captured. PM me if interested.

[Brutman]

You should be powering the floppy drive from the XP machine; trying to have the XP machine drive the floppy drive while powering it from the Jr adds another level of complexity that you don't need. It should work, but it's another variable.

I'm not sure about how well XP supports 5.25" floppy drives, but I don't remember any issues. Check for the following:

• BIOS is set to 360KB 5.25
• If you are using a two connector cable you might be using the wrong connector.
• The drive needs a terminating resistor. You didn't remove the terminating resistor, right?
• The drive might have jumpers on it to set what drive number it is on the controller. These vary from drive to drive.

I would hook it all back up again and just try to boot DOS from the floppy drive directly. You want to eliminate XP as the source of the problem. If you have room for both a 3.5" floppy and a 5.25" floppy get a 3.5" floppy in there and get it working first, because those are well supported under XP. You can then use the 3.5" floppy to boot something like DOS 6.2 or a Windows XP recovery disk, and then check the 5.25" drive for proper operation under DOS before moving to XP.

[Brutman]

BTW, what region are you in? Hargle is trustworthy and there are others of us that can do this. But if you are close to somebody a house call might even help debug the problem.

[pinesbrook]

Thanks so much for these helpful replies.

I'm in the NYC area, on Long Island but very close to Queens.

Hargle, the floppies I'm most interested in have files of endless BASIC programs I wrote when I was a kid, which would not be of great use to you . But I do have a few other (I imagine, fairly common) disks, i.e. some text adventure games and tutorial disks. I can PM you a full list if interested. As far as those .bas files, I'm looking to get at the individual files (not just a backup image of the entire floppy.)

Mike, I did not remove a terminating resistor. I will check about the jumpers and consider going the 3.5 floppy drive route, though I do not have one at this time.

Chuck, thanks for the ideas and best of luck to you.

Much appreciated,
Neil

[Chuckphd53]

Not sure if what I have on floppies is worth a hoot !

but now that I have the Zip100 working on the Jr....
I have a WIN98 with ZIP100 that I just put together and it has USB that I can go from my WIN10->WIN98->Jr all this with USB and ZIP100's

This just goes to show how much we love our Jr's....sheesss (smilin' all the time)

thanks
Chuck

[OldComputerGuy]

There was a 5.25" drive that I heard about a while back that would connect to a modern PC but from all I have read about it, it was read only for transferring files from old floppies to a more stable medium like CD/DVD/Blu Ray. I haven't seen one that connects to a modern machine that can read and write but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

[pinesbrook]

Unfortunately it seems my amateur meddling inside the PCjr may have caused an issue that wasn't there before. Now, my monitor (the standard PCjr one) only shows a scrolling scrambled image on booting up. It's far worse/beyond the control of the vertical/horizontal hold dials on the back of the monitor. Not sure what I could have done to result in this, as all internal cables are hooked up precisely as before.

Maybe I'm more interested than ever in finding a way to back up those floppies now.

[Trixter]

Connect the composite output to a TV and see if the image shows up correctly (ie. try to figure out if it's the PCjr or the monitor that is bad).