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I can't find the floppy drive on my computer which makes floppies useless. How do I insert floppies. Can someone please help.

abyss wrote:I can't find the floppy drive on my computer which makes floppies useless. How do I insert floppies. Can someone please help.

Well... does your PC even have a floppy drive? Many modern computers don't have one since they're so rarely used now.

The good news is that if you're trying to access 3.5" diskettes, there are quite a few external options (some of which use USB) so you can easily play the old games. If you need a 5.25" diskette drive, you may have to scour eBay or a garage sale of some sort. It's pretty difficult to find a 5.25" diskette drive nowadays. I've looked and the most I come up with are external 5.25" diskette drives for extremely old Macs.

If you don't have the right size floppy drive on your computer, you will need to get the floppy backed up onto, perhaps, CD-ROM, by finding a computer that DOES have the floppy drive. I suppose it's possible that disk/video duplicating places will be able to do this too.

Collector will be better at telling you step by step what's involved.

I need a floppy drive to play floppies. 5.25 inch and 3.5 inch floppies are what I plan to use.

abyss wrote:I need a floppy drive to play floppies. 5.25 inch and 3.5 inch floppies are what I plan to use.

As I said, 3.5" diskette drives can be found somewhat easily. The real trick is acquiring a 5.25" diskette drive (and then making sure it not only works, but that it's also compatible with your PC).

even if you get floppy drives, backing them up to CD is a good idea as well. that way if the disk ever fails (which eventually it will) you wont lose the contents.

You can get an external USB drive for your 3.5" disks. See this thread for more information. You may be SOL as far as the 5.25" goes. It is not just having a free bay and free controller, but also a compatible controller. if your PC does have a floppy controller, it may not work with a 5.25". You may need to resort to an old PC to make the drive usable.

Even if you get it going, you might still have problems reading the disks. The 5.25" disk tend to be older and as such are more likely to be corrupt. Also if you are talking about Tandy disks you can have additional issues. Some Tandys used a proprietary format instead of FAT12, rendering them unreadable on a modern PC.

Collector beat me to the punch of my own thread about 3.5" USB Floppies. The 5.25" Drives however - I have found no USB drives for those... simply put I don't think they will even make them anymore. Your best bet is finding an old computer that has it and copying the folders to the desktop then burning them on CD or copying them by some other means...

Hmmm... I wonder if anyone actually read the thread before posting. I suppose not, since what I advised has already been repeated twice.

I did read it - was just going to link my thread where I even linked USB 3.5 drives... but Collector beat me to it... and was just adding my two cents that I have been searching for 5.25" USB drives and have had no luck with it.

Thankfully some of the older laptops have 5.25" drives that I can use to copy files then either burn it or map them to a computer where I can burn the software.

You shouldn't have any problem locating a USB 3.5" drive. They're plentiful in almost any computer-related store. I happen to be lucky enough to still have not one but two 5.25" disk drives .

I have PCs on my patio that have 5.25" drives... just no slot on my main PC for the drive slot.