• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Possibly buying a computer with a 5.25 floppy drive and Windows 95.

F

facattack

Veteran Member
Joined
Mar 7, 2007
Messages
960
Location
Bucks County, PA
Does such a beast exist? Preferably SCSI, it could have an additional 3.5 drive but not necessary but would also prefer a CD-ROM drive of some sort, but the machine has to run 5.25 floppies. Windows 95 would be nice but not necessary. It could run DOS.
 
facattack said:
Does such a beast exist? Preferably SCSI, it could have an additional 3.5 drive but not necessary but would also prefer a CD-ROM drive of some sort, but the machine has to run 5.25 floppies. Windows 95 would be nice but not necessary. It could run DOS.
Click to expand...
??

New? Not likely!

Used? There's probably at least one sitting on a sidewalk somewhere in your town right now, waiting for the garbage truck. Not SCSI floppy of course but 5.25 & 3.5 floppies with HD, CD-ROM and W95 were common as dirt in their day, and probably most people here have or could put one together...

Am I missing something?
 
You can slap a 5.25" drive into just about any system of any age and it should work as expected. That's why you're getting a few confused looks.
 
facattack said:
Does such a beast exist? Preferably SCSI, it could have an additional 3.5 drive but not necessary but would also prefer a CD-ROM drive of some sort, but the machine has to run 5.25 floppies. Windows 95 would be nice but not necessary. It could run DOS.
Click to expand...
SCSI has always been a pricey option. If you want a SCSI machine, you will probably have to buy a computer and upgrade it to SCSI. A 486 computer will run Win95 or OS/2. I would try to get one with EISA slots. Throw in an Adaptec EISA SCSI controller with floppy support like the AHA-1742A. Then the SCSI CD\ROM and hard drive.
 
SUN machines used to come with a SCSI 3.5" floppy, but those are rare and expensive now. Never seen a 5.25" SCSI floppy drive but they might exist.

Most members here probably have a ton of old machines with 5.25" floppy drives and even bare drives (I have both), what exactly are you putting together?
 
Chuckster_in_Jax said:
SCSI has always been a pricey option. If you want a SCSI machine, you will probably have to buy a computer and upgrade it to SCSI. A 486 computer will run Win95 or OS/2. I would try to get one with EISA slots. Throw in an Adaptec EISA SCSI controller with floppy support like the AHA-1742A. Then the SCSI CD\ROM and hard drive.
Click to expand...

EISA, thats no fun and can be hard to find. Try a VLB SCSI card, the Adaptec AHA-2840A has a floppy controller. The only downside is that it lacks Windows NT 3.1 support.... works fine on every other time period OS though.
 
DOS lives on!! said:
Such computers do exist, but I don't think 5.25 drives were made in an SCSI form. You can get 5.25 drives in a SCSI external enclosure.
Click to expand...

They were. Consider the Teac FD55GS, 1.2M SCSI. You can still find them, but be prepared to look hard and pay through the nose.

Basically, they're not that much different from the FD235HS and FD235JS 3½" drives--basically, a non-S drive with a SCSI-to-floppy board attached.

SCSI drives and controllers can get to be extremely cheap. Nobody wants them anymore; sometimes someone is liquidating a server farm and the drives and controllers can be had for next to nothing.

There were 486 boards with built-in SCSI controllers also.
 
Pretty much any PC board made before 1998 will work fine with 5.25" floppies (and I've used up to XP with them.) Some even newer stuff works, but less commonly. SCSI's a little harder to come by, though.
 
While EISA motherboards are hard to find EISA SCSI cards are easy to find and usually dirt cheap. PCI SCSI cards are also dirt cheap on ebay and you can find them in bulk sometimes too (I snagged something like 15 for less then $1 each shipped).

As Chuck stated nobody wants SCSI anymore (except me of course). For vintage systems using DOS SCSI works out well (no issues with 512MB partions and you can have as many partitions as you like on large drives plus they tend to be faster then the older IDE drives and don't use up the CPU moving data around).
 
njroadfan said:
EISA, thats no fun and can be hard to find. Try a VLB SCSI card, the Adaptec AHA-2840A has a floppy controller. The only downside is that it lacks Windows NT 3.1 support.... works fine on every other time period OS though.
Click to expand...

While VLB would be a good option, most motherboards that support VLB only have one VLB slot and that was usually used for the video card. EISA ain't all THAT bad. Just make sure you can get the configuration file for the mobo and adapters before purchasing.
 
Chuckster_in_Jax said:
While VLB would be a good option, most motherboards that support VLB only have one VLB slot and that was usually used for the video card. EISA ain't all THAT bad. Just make sure you can get the configuration file for the mobo and adapters before purchasing.
Click to expand...
Just make sure if you have any other add on card with floppy in the same system, disable it; the floppy disable switch on 2840 does not work as advertised...
 
Chuckster_in_Jax said:
While VLB would be a good option, most motherboards that support VLB only have one VLB slot and that was usually used for the video card.
Click to expand...

Actually, it's been my experience so far that there are many 2 and 3 slot VLB motherboards out there, a quick peek over ebay revealed many of these, though I find that stuff overpriced on there in general. I'm sure with a just little hunting it would be easy to scrounge up a free or very cheap 486 board with 2 or 3 VLB slots to play with, I've got probably half a dozen stacked in a box in varying condition...

Unless I'm missing something on how those boards handle the extra slots?
 
Two VLB slots are the most common, there are plenty of 3 slot MBs out there. The only 1 slot VLB I have seen was a combo PCI/VLB board.
 
If I remember right, the trick with VLB and the number of slots depended on bus speed. I can't remember if the cutoff was 25/33/40, or 33/40/50, but basically, at top speed you could only run one slot reliably, but each speed grade you stepped down, you could run one more slot. The inability to run multiple VLB cards was the reason the 50 MHz 486 bus never caught on.

But there were plenty of cases that had room for both a CD-ROM drive and a 5.25" drive. And if you want SCSI, you could step up to a Pentium with PCI and drop in an Adaptec 2940 card. The last I checked on those, they were still cheap and plentiful. If that's changed, I know I have at least one I could part with.

In the 1990s, it was slightly unusual to see a system with a 3.5" floppy, 5.25" floppy and a CD-ROM drive but not unheard of. Most minitower cases could easily accomodate that many drive bays, and larger desktop systems could too. So if you can't find a system with everything you want in it, just find one with an empty bay and drop in whatever it lacks that you want.
 
I thought SCSI was what 5.25 ran off of. Uh, if not, then what???

Unknown_K said:
Most members here probably have a ton of old machines with 5.25" floppy drives and even bare drives (I have both), what exactly are you putting together?
Click to expand...

Uh, I'm about to sound rather stupid and newbish, but a friend has tons of old Commodore 64 & a few DOS games that she can't run on Windows 7 laptop she has now. I was going to archive the games onto an external USB hard drive. I probably should look at what her collection is and download the games off the internet. But for some reason I was thinking it would be "fun" to be able to load them onto the machine via disk then copy to hard drive. Thus the need for a 5.25 drive.

I could run the C-64 games off of emulator I think and I sorta figured Windows '95 would be compliant enough to run games she claims ran natively with Windows 3.11. There's always an option of dual booting different OSes.

I'm not sure she could acclimate herself to a computer running Linux..

Other than all that jazz, I'm sorry I said "SCSI" because that just railroaded a lot of replies. :( DOH!
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top