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Old 29-12-2010, 03:27 PM   #1
Xhumed
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Join Date: May 2009
Location: Truro, England
Posts: 48
Default 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.
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