5.25 --> 3.5 Floppy Disk migration

[Giovanni Jimenez]

I recently picked up some nice programs for the HP-85, but they are on 5 1/4" Floppy Diskettes.

Would someone in this forum, who owns the appropriate Disk Drives, be so kind to migrate these programs from the 5 1/4" to 3 1/2" floppies for me? Of course I would supply the 3 1/2" disks and shipping both ways.

thank you !

[bill platt]

I never had any 8088 programs last more than a year on 5-1/4" disks. They were always corrupt and unreadable.

Are these programs readable?

[Dave Shaffer (Arizona)]

Hi Bill and Giovanni,

I just resurrected my 20 (!) year old Pentium Pro (with overdrive, so it is running at 400 MHz!) and I can read 20 year old 5.25 floppies. It even runs Windows98.

I have invited Giovanni to send me his disks.

[bill platt]

Holy Cow!

I got rid of my P50 486 a few years back. I suppose I should have kept it. Not for the 5-1/4s though--for the still-working 100 MB hard drive and the Windows 3.1 for giggles!

[Andrés C. Rodríguez (Argentina)]

The formatting and filesystem are critical to read those floppies. For instance, I have one 5.25" hard-sectored, and I don't think I will ever be able to read the files it contains. Perhaps with a huge time budget it can be done, but such budget doesn't exist.

It the files were created on a PC or similar equipment (MS-DOS, FAT), you will be able to recover, but if they were created on a CP/M system (i.e.: Z-80 machines as just one example), things will be harder. Were your disks created on an HP-85 with an external floppy drive, perhaps connected to HP-IB (just guessing)?

[Giovanni Jimenez]

Thank you Dave!! I will send the floppies this w/end (after tax season:)

I don't know much about those programs, but I believe they are either original from HP or copied directly from original diskettes via HP-IB.

Thank you all,

Giovanni

[Eric Rechlin]

The Pentium Pro didn't come out until less than 15 years ago, in late 1995...

[Dave Shaffer (Arizona)]

OK - at any rate, it has been sitting around for a while.

Next challenge: to take the ORIGINAL IBM PC/AT (Circa 1982) out of its box and see if it still runs. I remember when I put in a speed-up option (from 6 to 8 MHz, IIRC) and upgraded the hard drive from 20 to 30 MB - what a feeling of power I had!! I still use the PC/AT keyboard everyday for whatever is my current PC.