five & 1/2 inch floppy disks?!

Hello everyone,

I have recently been given a number of old 5 1/2 inch floppy disks, from which i need to retrieve the data from within them.
However i have no idea of how to go about it.

Does anyone know how i could possibly do this?

Thanks,
Doc

You will need to find a really old PC on ebay with a 51/2 inch drive

but then you face the problem of getting the info off a hard drive, a 386 IBM should have that drive, but being magnetic media there may be no recoverable data on there at all

Doctor77 said:

I have recently been given a number of old 5 1/2 inch floppy disks, from which i need to retrieve the data from within them.
However i have no idea of how to go about it.

Click to expand...

5 1/2 or 5 1/4??

Endorsing louishen's advice, I suggest a further step. Find if you can an old PC, even an old PPC Mac (eg. 9500 or 9600) with both 5.25" and 3.5" drives. The drives can be external 'bare' ones, which can be connected by scsi (serial?) cable. If possible, transfer the data from the 5.25 to 3.5 disks (yes, it's an extra step).

3.5" external floppy drives with USB connector may still be available (IBM produced them - I use one occasionally) but where in your location they might be found I cannot say.

Magnetic data is unstable after xx years, but you might be pleasantly surprised at how well it's been preserved. I have 3.5 floppy disks retained for nostalgic reasons, and the material thereon is still okay.