Posey's Tips & Tricks
Is This My Strangest Project Ever?
Building a modern PC to read decades-old floppy disks turns into a quirky retrocomputing challenge with uncertain odds.
Over the weekend, I spent a couple of hours looking for something in my attic. In the process, I rediscovered two huge plastic bins filled with media. I hadn't touched these bins since moving in almost 20 years ago. Looking inside, I found that the media consisted mostly of old PC games, though to be honest, I didn't take the time to go through everything. I did, however, discover a disk containing my 1993 sociology class project that I never turned in because I misplaced disk. LOL!
As I thought about all of the old games, I began to think about how much fun it would be to play some of them again. However, there were three major obstacles standing in the way of doing that.
The first obstacle is that most of the old games are intended for use on operating systems that no longer exist or are no longer supported. Many are probably 16-bit (possibly even 8-bit) and won't run on modern hardware without some help.
The second obstacle is that the old games are stored on older media formats. I am guessing that the ones stored on CD probably won't be overly problematic, but my collection of ancient media includes hundreds of floppy disks. I'm not just talking about 3.5-inch floppy disks either. I have a huge number of 5.25-inch floppies, some of which are more than 40 years old!
As it stands right now, I have no idea as to whether any of these disks are still viable. After all, they have spent nearly 20 years baking in my attic. I live in the south and my attic gets crazy hot during the summer months. According to one estimate that I found online, attics can reach 120 to 150 degrees during the summer months.
In spite of all of this, I am optimistic that at least some of the media may be viable. About three years ago, I wrote an article called "Settling a Stupid Bet: Can a Hyper-V VM Read a Floppy Disk?" When I wrote that article, I attached a 3.5-inch USB floppy drive to a Hyper-V server and read a Windows 95 boot disk, which had also come from my attic. That particular disk was perfectly fine despite it being nearly 30 years old.
Of course, the 5.25-inch disks pose a more unique challenge. Not only are they older and potentially more fragile than their 3.5-inch counterparts, but there are also no USB based 5.25-inch floppy drives that you can buy. Similarly, modern systems lack the old 34 pin controllers that are necessary to connect these drives.
As a project, I decided to see if I could build a media conversion PC. The idea was to create a modern PC, but include an internal 5.25-inch floppy drive, an internal 3.5-inch floppy drive, a Blue Ray drive (for reading those CDs that I mentioned) and a modern card reader that could read SD cards, as well as legacy card formats. On top of all of that, I want to run Windows 11 on this machine, although I am open to running Linux if Windows 11 proves to be impossible.
If I am to be completely honest with you, this project has a lot more to do with challenging myself than it does with trying to read a 40-year-old disk that may or may not even be viable. Even as I write this post, I am not 100 percent sure that this is going to work. Even so, I have a plan!
I am building the PC almost entirely from parts that are stored in boxes in my attic (this approach seemed only fitting). The PC itself is going to be based on an old 11th generation Intel motherboard with an i9 CPU. I also found an old full tower PC case with lots of external drive bays. Believe it or not, I even have some old floppy drives that I can use for this project (assuming that they still work).
As promising as all of that may sound, there is still the pesky issue of actually connecting ancient floppy drives to a semi-modern PC.
The 3.5-inch floppy drive is definitely going to be the easier of the two. Amazon sells USB adapters for 3.5-inch floppy drives. As such, I simply ordered one of these adapters. I also ordered a cable that will allow me to connect the USB adapter directly to one of the USB headers on the motherboard.
The 5.25-inch floppy drive is going to be a much bigger challenge. You can't just order a USB adapter for these drives from Amazon. After doing a lot of research, I found a device called Greaseweazle. This device will allow you to physically connect a 5.25-inch floppy drive to a USB interface. The catch is that you can only read disks at the flux level, meaning that special software is required. Based on what I have been reading, it seems that you must create a disk image rather than being able to access the disk directly from the operating system as you would a normal disk.
It remains to be seen whether any of this will work, let alone whether I can successfully resurrect and play any of my old PC games. Even so, I thought that it would be fun to try. Being that I already had nearly everything that I needed, the cost involved in this project was very minimal. If all goes well, I am hoping to eventually build custom software that will allow me to stream old DOS games to other systems in my home.
About the Author
Brien Posey is a 22-time Microsoft MVP with decades of IT experience. As a freelance writer, Posey has written thousands of articles and contributed to several dozen books on a wide variety of IT topics. Prior to going freelance, Posey was a CIO for a national chain of hospitals and health care facilities. He has also served as a network administrator for some of the country's largest insurance companies and for the Department of Defense at Fort Knox. In addition to his continued work in IT, Posey has spent the last several years actively training as a commercial scientist-astronaut candidate in preparation to fly on a mission to study polar mesospheric clouds from space. You can follow his spaceflight training on his Web site.