bitflipper Posted June 28, 2023 Share Posted June 28, 2023 4 hours ago, JohnnyV said: ...I hope the floppy disks can be read by W10. And that's not guaranteed. Not because of Win10/11, as they'll be able to read a floppy no problem. However, diskettes can become corrupted over time, and unless the original drive and the drive you're reading from were/are aligned correctly (or equally mis-aligned) the diskettes may not be readable on the new drive. Unless you have other drives available, you'll be outa luck. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Vere Posted June 28, 2023 Share Posted June 28, 2023 1 hour ago, bitflipper said: However, diskettes can become corrupted over time, I keep forgetting, Floppies were magnetic weren't they? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jimbo 88 Posted June 28, 2023 Share Posted June 28, 2023 11 hours ago, bitflipper said: And that's not guaranteed. Not because of Win10/11, as they'll be able to read a floppy no problem. However, diskettes can become corrupted over time, and unless the original drive and the drive you're reading from were/are aligned correctly (or equally mis-aligned) the diskettes may not be readable on the new drive. Unless you have other drives available, you'll be outa luck. Man, I forgot about all this. And the fact that the disks are magnetic. I've seen what happens to audio and video tapes over years and it's been almost 30 since I put that rig together. I'd better fire up that laptop and see what loads before I invest in this thing. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Vere Posted June 28, 2023 Share Posted June 28, 2023 If you buy it from Amazon and it doesn’t work they ask no questions and you can easily return it. Hint, hint. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Starship Krupa Posted June 29, 2023 Share Posted June 29, 2023 On 6/22/2023 at 9:00 PM, Jimbo 88 said: OMG What a great idea! I have a laptop from 1992 that I can fire up. And a case of disks with all my old projects. If I can find away to transfer files off that laptop. I do not have an old, external hard drive (just the drive in the laptop) ... and thumb drives, internet connections did not exist. I still have all the old midi sound modules that all work except the Casio FZ1 that I used mostly for piano samples. A project for a rainy day. What OS is on this laptop? If it's at least Windows for Workgroups 3.11, and it can connect to your home network, you may be able to transfer the files via Windows networking. The newer the OS (Windows 95, 98, XP), the better your chances. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jimbo 88 Posted June 29, 2023 Share Posted June 29, 2023 12 hours ago, Starship Krupa said: What OS is on this laptop? If it's at least Windows for Workgroups 3.11, and it can connect to your home network, you may be able to transfer the files via Windows networking. The newer the OS (Windows 95, 98, XP), the better your chances. Thanks for the idea. I'll check it out, I think the OS could be 3.11, it is something in the the 3's. But I really don't think there is a physical way to network on this laptop (Gateway... back when they made really good laptops) except perhaps out the parallel port that as now, is configured to handled the midi/sympte card. All of which still works very well. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oneofmany Posted June 29, 2023 Share Posted June 29, 2023 (edited) Simplest solution is to simply remove the old laptop hard drive (will probably be ide, with pins) and connect it to an adapter that allows it to plug into new device via USB. It will show up as a drive similar to a flash drive. Navigate in file explorer and copy required files. As far as floppy disk drives, as mentioned above they quite often don't work as the heads are not aligned with the disks. https://www.startech.com/en-us/hdd/usb3ssataide Edited June 29, 2023 by oneofmany 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Terry Kelley Posted June 29, 2023 Share Posted June 29, 2023 I had old .wrk files that wouldn't load into 64-bit Cakwalk 8.0 (with updates) but would in 32 bit. I would have to re-save them in 32-bit and then they would load into 64-bit. I'll dig some out and see if they will load in CbB. Otherwise CbB has been pretty consistent. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Starship Krupa Posted June 29, 2023 Share Posted June 29, 2023 5 hours ago, Jimbo 88 said: I think the OS could be 3.11, it is something in the the 3's Ah. Now that I think of it, back in the first half of the 90's, laptops didn't come with ethernet built in. You'd get an ethernet PCMCIA card, if your laptop even had a PCMCIA slot. Then they grew internal modems, which stuck for about 15 years, then ethernet, which seems to still be with us, then built-in wi-fi. Chances are that if your floppies can be read by the laptop's floppy drive, they can be read by an external floppy drive. If not, there are various strategies to help with floppies that can be read by one system and not another. One is to format the floppy in the target system. Then see if it's read/writable in the old system, in which case you can copy your files to the laptop's HD and then to the newly formatted disk(s). 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jimbo 88 Posted June 29, 2023 Share Posted June 29, 2023 Is this not the greatest forum ever? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Starship Krupa Posted June 30, 2023 Share Posted June 30, 2023 1 hour ago, Jimbo 88 said: Is this not the greatest forum ever? Certainly one of the better ones I've participated in over the decades. And the best one for a product. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oneofmany Posted June 30, 2023 Share Posted June 30, 2023 5 hours ago, Starship Krupa said: Chances are that if your floppies can be read by the laptop's floppy drive, they can be read by an external floppy drive. Unfortunately this is not always true. Floppy drives use mechanical alignment to both format, write and read data. Over time, especially in laptops where there is a lot of bumping and jarring, the zero point can be slightly moved, preventing the read write heads to be over the starting point. This makes the drive unable to properly index the sectors containing the directory structure, which will bring up the "this disk is not formatted" message as the OS now believes the disk is not. It was not uncommon for someone to replace the drive upon failure and finding the new one unable to read the disks. Older utilities included alignment software which was to be run periodically to alleviate this issue. Definitely use the floppy drive (if working) to move files to hard drive, remove drive, plug in to device I listed and you are good to go. Every tech has one. They do 3.5/2.5" IDE, and SATA. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Starship Krupa Posted June 30, 2023 Share Posted June 30, 2023 23 minutes ago, oneofmany said: Unfortunately this is not always true. Hence my "chances are." No, it's not always true, for the reasons you mention, but it's something to try that increases the chance of success. 26 minutes ago, oneofmany said: move files to hard drive, remove drive, plug in to device I listed and you are good to go. Every tech has one. They do 3.5/2.5" IDE, and SATA Very useful to have around, I should really get one. It's a better idea than trying to get the new computer to read floppies from the old one. Who knows, though, if the laptop's internal drive can no longer read the floppies, a new one might.? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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