An external 5¼" floppy drive for almost any vintage PC
i really like small form factor desktop pcs because they can do nearly everything a full-size computer can do while taking up not nearly as much space however there's one thing most of them lack and that is a five and a quarter inch disk drive or even any space to install one for example this ncr and this tandy don't have any five and a quarter inch drive bays at all and this compaq does have a single five and a quarter inch drive bay but it's taken up by the optical drive and even if you wanted to remove this and install a five and a quarter inch floppy drive you can't because its floppy drive controller only supports a single floppy drive which would be the internal three and a half inch drive obviously these days most people don't use any kind of floppy disks anymore but if you are a vintage computer enthusiast it's very handy to have a five and a quarter inch disk drive because it gives you access to old games software and data you may have on this size of floppy disk and it allows you to make use of computers which only have five and a quarter inch floppy drives or have a five and a quarter inch A: drive and don't have a working hard drive in which case the computer won't be usable unless you have some way to make a five and a quarter inch boot disk luckily back in the day there were a variety of external five and a quarter inch floppy drives available such as this one that radio shack sold as a companion to their tandy 1000RL computer and unlike their previous external floppy drives which use the proprietary connector this one plugs into a standard parallel printer port and despite being sold by radio shack and designed to go with their tandy computers the only thing tandy about it is the name that's printed on the front this drive was actually made by a company called micro solutions who made the long-running backpack series of external floppy drives cd-rom drives hard drives and tape backup drives and in the documentation tandy says this drive will work with any XT AT or PS/2 compatible pc with a standard ibm type parallel port i've been wanting one of these ever since i got my tandy 1000RL back in 2008 and just now in 2021 i finally found one on ebay sold as is not guaranteed to be working and not including the power supply or driver disk luckily for me this drive is in working condition and you can download the driver disk for it from the tvdog tandy 1000 archive site and also they have all the documentation from it from their tandy faxback archive and it takes a 12 volt ac power supply not dc so i was able to find this power adapter for it which works i think this came from a modem and this is a standard epson five and a quarter inch high density disk drive so if there was something wrong with this drive I would be able to replace it fairly easily and that's the unusual thing about this even though it was designed to work with xt class machines which normally don't have a high density floppy drive controller built in because this is an external parallel port drive with its own driver software and controller chip in it it's able to support high density 1.2 megabyte disks as well as 360k double density disks on the back it has the permanently attached parallel printer port cable a pass-through for your printer and there's the input for the 12 volt ac power supply it says it requires a current of 850 milliamps so this one amp supply is perfect for it and also an on off switch and there's the information sticker on the bottom it's tandy model number 25-1087 sometimes printed as 250-1087 and yes i noticed it was missing one of the retaining screws for the pass-through printer port so i was able to find one in my box of screws and its case is made entirely of metal with the cover removed we can see a very standard looking five and a quarter inch epson floppy drive it has the terminating resistor installed and it's set to drive select one and there is the standard card edge connector connected to this small circuit board which has the dc power supply providing 5 and 12 volts dc through the standard molex plug and it has the controller chip hiding underneath there and there you can see the floppy drive is an epson sd-680L and while i have it open i did remove this shield and clean the drive heads with the drive plugged into power but not connected to a computer yet we don't get any signs of life if we turn on the power not even a flash from the indicator led but that's normal and if you want to use this drive with the tandy 1000RL computer tandy originally listed it in their catalog as may require modification to use it with the 1000RL and here i'll show you exactly what that modification is that's because as shipped from the factory the 1000RL does not have the select pin connected to the parallel printer port so there's a jumper you have to add to the motherboard to enable that first you have to remove this daughter board you just unscrew it from the top here and it just lifts out and then you get access to that jumper pin right next to the printer port you see pins labeled e2 e3 and e4 what you got to do is add a blob of solder connecting e2 and e3 you may also be able to use one of those conductive circuit trace pens but i just added a blob of solder and that enables the select pin to be connected to the printer port allowing you to use the drive with it now i have the drive turned on and connected to my tandy 1000RLX and i could make up some excuse as to why i switched from the RL to the RLX such as this one has VGA output so i can use it with an lcd monitor which is easier to film but the real answer is for whatever reason i couldn't get this drive to work with the 1000RL even after following tandy's instructions about that modification that needs to be done it did recognize the drive but whenever i tried to access it there was no sign of life from the drive itself it didn't even turn on the led or spin the disk and the computer would lock up to such an extent that i couldn't even hit control alt delete to restart it i would need to turn it off and turn it back on and in the 1000RL setup program there is an option called parallel OE i have no idea what that means it's normally turned on by default i tried turning it off but that made no difference and then just as a sanity check i tried disabling the parallel port and then the driver complained it couldn't find the drive so that proves the port is working to at least some extent but i realized i never actually tested the parallel port on the 1000RL with any other devices so i connected my okidata dot matrix printer to the pass-through port on the back of the drive and with that connected i was able to print a text document to the printer so that proves the port is working but for some reason i just can't get the drive to work with it so that's why i switched to the 1000RLX and spoiler alert i already tested it i know it works and here are the disks i'm going to try using it with i have a copy of the chessmaster 2000 on a 360k disk i'm gonna try running that game i have a blank 360k disk that i'm going to try formatting and one of the very few high density 1.2 megabyte disks i own i don't have very many of these because by the time i got a high density five and a quarter inch disk drive at the same time i got a high density three and a half inch disk drive which has higher capacity and obviously the disks are smaller and in my experience more reliable so i just didn't have a need to use these high density five and quarter inch disks but i do at least have one here that i'm going to try using and formatting and of course i have the three and a half inch disk that i copied the driver software onto when you unzip the contents of the driver file that you download from the tandy 1000 archive website here's what you'll get and the easy way to install it is just to run the extsetup program it comes with but if you're not afraid of editing the config.sys file it's easy to install it manually just copy these files to some location on your hard drive and then you add a device command to the config.sys file pointing to the location of the extdrvr.sys file it comes with in this case i put it in my utilities directory and on the end of it you indicate the drive letter you want to use in this case the computer only has one floppy drive so i can use the external drive as B: and there's one other option you can add and that's called nonstop what that does is if you do not have the drive connected or turned on instead of giving you an error message and waiting for you to press the escape key it just skips over it and continues so if you don't intend to have the drive connected and turned on all the time it's easier to add this nonstop option and now when you restart the computer you'll see the message on a screen saying the following tandy external drive is available in this case is assigned to drive letter B: five and a quarter inch 1.2 megabyte
so now i'll try it with the chessmaster 2000 disk put it in the drive type B: and bring up a directory a lot of files on this disk but to run it you just type autoexec and there we go the chessmaster 2000 running from the external floppy drive i'll select rgb color monitor this game predates vga so it's only going to be i guess ega at best and there it is the chessmaster 2000 game and here we go that high density disk let's see what's on it a lot of file names i don't recognize but i'll see what's in that first directory dlny oh there is a program in there dl let's see what that is something about lawyers i would guess dl drafting libraries by attorney's computer network are you a sole practitioner yes enter your name as it should appear in documents we recommend that you use initial capital letters and end with esq. which is short for esquire so i'll just do vwestlife esquire street address i'll put in their example here 101 main street suite 201 washington dc oh what is the zip for that 20101 or something like that telephone number 555-555-1234 current year let's see if this is y2k compatible 2021 a dual floppy ibm pc some other computer with two floppy drives ibm xt at ps/2 or any clone with a hard drive designated as drive c so i'll choose that option do you wish to use the floppy drive usually no i'll say no most people copy the numbers disks into the forms subdirectory on the hard disk are you going to use or have been using c: backslash forms to store the numbers disk usually yes i'll say yes i don't have any of those installed but i'll say wordperfect most law offices traditionally use the larger 10 pitch type but some law offices prefer the smaller type it says usually no so i'll say no do you wish to change the default left margin answer no okay i'll say no then so many questions i'll just use the defaults okay it says been completed so what did it put it in it's in the forms directory and well where did it go i don't see any new directories on the hard drive so what did it just put it back on the floppy well whatever it proves that the floppy drive works well since i don't really care what's on that high density disk i'll try formatting it and this is where you may run into another snag the documentation for the drive says it should work with the normal dos format command but when i try to do it it just immediately says track zero bad disk unusable so i have to use the extfmt program that it came with to format the disk and now it should work what? it was just working now it works okay see i don't like these high density disks they're just so much more unreliable than 360k disks at least now it looks like it's working now the format is complete and just as i suspected it did find some bad sectors so there you go proof that these high density five and a quarter inch disks are just not that reliable i don't like using these you may be wondering because this drive was made by the same company that made the backpack drives and is basically identical to one does it work with a backpack driver and unfortunately the answer is no as you can see i tried loading the driver for a backpack drive and it just says the drive was not found another thing you may be wondering is since it just uses a standard five and a quarter inch floppy drive with the standard interface cable and power connectors could you take that drive out and put something else in like a three and a half inch drive or an older 360k five and a quarter inch drive and initially the answer looks like it could be yes because if you snoop in the contents of the device driver program for it you can clearly see it list options for five and a quarter inch 360k five and a quarter inch 800k which is not a typical format five and a quarter inch 1.2 megabyte three and a half inch 720k three and a half inch 1.4 megabyte he even lists three and a half inch 2.8 megabyte and an 8 inch drive and if you look further down in the file where it shows all the settings you can use there you can see the nonstop option i mentioned earlier and it has another option where you can specify which port you have it connected to for example if you have two parallel ports you can tell it lpt2 to use the second one but notice there's an option that says drivetype so let's edit the config.sys file and add on the end here drivetype equals 360 and see if that works but when we restart even with that drivetype set to 360k it still says 1.2 megabyte and you may think maybe i just didn't type it correctly maybe i need to type like 360kb or something like that so let's try that and now it complains that it's unrecognized parameter so i did have it right the first time so for whatever reason even though those options are there for different drive types it doesn't work it just permanently set to five and a quarter inch 1.2 megabyte
now that i proved that the drive works with at least one vintage tandy computer that it was originally meant to be used with how about i try using it with a more modern non-tandy computer here is probably one of the newest computers you can use with this drive it's an ibm thinkpad t20 it's a pentium III laptop which has a parallel printer port and it's running windows 98 second edition which is the last version of windows which supports real mode dos drivers for devices such as this because i doubt windows has a plug and play driver for this i also connected a usb 3.5 inch disk drive so i can load the driver for this drive but first i'll just try turning it on and letting windows start up and see if it recognizes this drive at all which i doubt it will despite what the desktop background may suggest this is windows 98 second edition and so far has not recognized any new hardware so i'll go into the control panel and i'll click on add new hardware again i'm not expecting this to work but i'm gonna try anyway okay i already knew about these two devices so those are not new no it's not in that list do you wanna search for new hardware yes okay let's try and just as i suspected it didn't find anything so we'll need to add that driver to the config.sys file just like we did in dos and i actually didn't have a config.sys file on this computer because
windows 98 just does everything automatically so i created one and i inserted this device command aha the following tandy external drive is available drive B: five a quarter inch 1.2 megabyte what? well it turns out the driver is working on this computer but as soon as windows 98 tries to load it it just craps out and can't access anything on the hard drive my guess is this is happening because the driver for it is not fat32 compatible so if you used it on a windows 95 or 98 machine where the hard drive is formatted as fat16 then it probably would work so i pulled out my toshiba satellite 105cs laptop which is a pentium it's running pc dos 2000 and windows 3.11 i installed the driver and it's working fine so as long as you have a computer that's running pure dos and it has a fully ibm compatible parallel port and by the way it does not need to be a bidirectional parallel port i still don't know why i couldn't get it to work with the 1000RL even after doing the modification that tandy said it should work with but otherwise if you have an old pc that's running dos and it has a parallel port and you want to add a five and a quarter inch disk drive this would work fine now if you can get one of those backpack drives that would be even better because those actually do have drivers for windows 95 and 98 at least i've proven that there's nothing tandy specific about this drive other than the name that's on the front of it overall i'm very happy with it because it's a practical solution to add a five and a quarter inch disk drive to a computer that ordinarily only has a three and a half inch disk drive
2021-11-28 20:10
