What 5.25" floppy drives can recover old games?
 

Does anyone here use a 5.25" drive to recover old games from floppies and if so what make, type of drive is it please?

I have been trying to copy the game files from an old game called "Conflict Europe" but have not had a lot of success, I have discovered after some research that the old 5.25" floppy drives are more complicated than at first appear and there are quite a few different types of floppy disc like 360KB, 720KB, 1.2MB, etc, and some drives will only read some disks because of the number of tracks, the speed of rotation and density of disk.

Can someone confirm that most early games on 5.25" floppies are on 360KB disks?
It might sound like a dumb question but if the drive can't read the disk correctly and the size of the disk is not on it or the game box how can you identify it's capacity?

The drive I bought (TEAC FD - 55FR 511 - U) turns out to be a drive that seems to only read 720KB disks and won't read "Conflict Europe" which I think is a 360KB disk.
I have used an excellent program called "WinImage" which was recommended to me by "The Fab" a member on Abandonia but I get error messages indicating again that the drive can't read the disk correctly.
I have built a PC specifically as a test bed for using a 5.25" floppy drive and the mobo has BIOS settings for 5.25" 360KB, 720KB drives so that side of things should be alright.

Any help on the subject would be most appreciated as I have many old games on 5.25" floppy that I would like to save and run on Dosbox and maybe post here if suitable.

Program is WinImage, but the OS .....???????

Not neccessarily. Floppy disks don't last forever - I've seen some go within 7 years of purchase, and yours are probably much older than that.

It's unlikely that you're dealing with some weird backwards compatibility issue, altough a booter game which isn't using an actual file system might be possible. Try rawrite2 and/or Floppy Disk Analyzer.

I suggest you put that one aside for the moment and continue going with the other ones you've got to copy and see if the problem occurs on another.

Sorry, forgot that, XP.

Thanks for the info on rawwrite2, I tried the first rawwrite but it said it was incompatible with 5.25" disks I will try version 2 along with analyser, I have tried some other disks I have but get similar errors, maybe all my disks are corrupted :>(

Try to "plain" read it for beginning. If you see any files on floppy - your drive probably all right, in terms of compatibility.

Try also turn disc to another side - if it is single-sided, maybe you placed it wrong? :)

Also, if you see files, try to copy at least it - in most cases it is enough to recover game. Total Commander is big help with recovering here: you can order it to "Retry" file, until you read it at last (proven that it could be read at all :)

Also, yes, floppy-drive itself could be the reason of the problems. I remember my old days on Speccy, when most of sold 5,25 drives was incompatible to each other and needed to be ajusted manually... %) Maybe it is only cheap Soviet drives, though.

I have tried both sides of the disks as some disks are double sided but still get the same error messages like "insert disk", "Drive "A" is not accessible" or "Do you want to format the disk".

From what I can determine on "Vintage computer.com" (it's not my post but it covers my problems) these messages are because the BIOS settings are not correct for this type of drive, when the BIOS is set for a 360KB 5.25 drive my 720KB drive is spinning too fast and looking for 80 tracks on the disk but only finding 40 and the drive does not recognize the 40 track 360KB disk which is why it want's to format it.
Some drives are duel speed and will read 40 and 80 track disks unfortunately, I seem to have bought a very specific drive that only reads 720KB disks :sucks:

Hell to it, I going to play BIOSHOCK..:rocks::minigun::rocket: