486 eBay Pickup
A 486 DX4 100Mhz machine I won off eBay today.
Apart from some rust on the back panel of the sound card, it's overall very clean and tidy.
It's the first time in about 20 years I've had a 5.25" floppy drive again, so would be great for future software archiving. Some of my software collection did have some of these as new disks.
Apart from some rust on the back panel of the sound card, it's overall very clean and tidy.
It's the first time in about 20 years I've had a 5.25" floppy drive again, so would be great for future software archiving. Some of my software collection did have some of these as new disks.
Comments
I wonder the BIOS screen of this 486 PC, hehehe.
Everyone should have a 5.25" floppy drive! Better yet, a dozen
AGREE COMPLETELY.
I have a 5.25 drive in all my old PCs and have accumulated DD, HD and combo FDDs for Backup.
Even with limited use to only install and archive old software, they fail after a time.
It is nice to be able to replace them on the spot from inventory.
The first time I had to replace a 5.25 HD floppy, it cost me almost $60 from ABC Resellers.
After that experience, I buy them as available on Ebay for about $15-30. Only had (2) bad ones and the seller replaced them.
One reason why I like to have a network card in all my old machines and reduce the need to use the floppy apart from OS installation.
You will want to keep a couple of cleaning disks handy, and use them ocasionally especially after running crufty or potentially degrading disks. Have one by your side if you ever encounter a disk with the brand name "Wabash" on it.
On 5.25 inch drives, sometimes you may need to clean and re-lubricate the rails that the head travels on. I forget the exact lubricant to use, but it needs to not attract dust. But only mess with that if the drive is giving you problems or is visibly dirty.
On cheaper drives, especially Tandon 5.25" full heights, head alignment can be an issue. Keep a few known good quality but disposable factory original write protected disks (such as mouse driver disks) around. If you can run a disk test through those with no errors and no retry then you can be sure your head alignment is good enough. That looks like a good Teac, so you should not have that problem - but nice to check some times just as a sanity test.
Thats cheating! :P
At least some installers such as Microsoft Office 4.3 let you copy the entire contents to a hard drive, CD, or network share and run from there. But IBM OS/2 software... it's like the only media source they ever heard of was floppy.
Have you tried this technique?
http://www.verrua.org/cleaning_kit_floppy/cleaning_kit_floppy.htm
I don't have any spare disks for it, but can at least try with one of the Microsoft Mouse driver disks I have still sealed.
Next I wouldn't mind a 386 DX, though depends on what comes up which isn't much.
BTW most cleaning disks say you are only supposed to use them a maximum of a dozen or so times, but that was just a gimmick to get idiots to buy more. If you start to see visible discoloration on a cleaning disk you can just wash it with water (don't use soaps that leave behind residues though) and perhaps an old toothbrush. It doesn't need to be replaced unless the fiber material looks visibly frayed. Taken care of, they should last thousands of uses.
Now, for people like myself that regularly bring in unknown rotting disks I find it is good (after inspection and cleaning of the disk itself) to test and "introduce" the disk using a drive that is sitting out with no enclosure. That way if the disk makes a huge mess then it is easy to manually clean the drive with a Q-tip and alcohol.