msp1

Sounds mad but I desperately need a 3.5" floppy disk drive out of an old 286. Task given to me by my boss, sounds like he's testing my resourcefulness but in actual fact I need it to backup some data. Apparently the connector on a 286 is different to the later 386/486 machines. Any help greatly appreciated.

Mike

DemonDave

iTrader: (13)

http://www.bullnet.co.uk/shops/live/computer.htm ?

Dave.

john_s

iTrader: (1)

You can get cables with both types of floppy connector on (think i've got some here). The old type is the edge connector type.

If you need one really quickly, you could take a normal cable and crimp on an IDC connector (make sure you keep the twist in if you want to use it was drive A). If you've got a local Maplin, i think they should have the connector.

HTH

John

msp1

Dave, thanks for the link. Does it belong in the muppet show, BULL ELECTRICAL, first item for sale written by DAVID DICK
Will give them a ring tomorrow.

If this fails will take Johns advice, I assume there were only ever two types of connector for floppy drives, ones like the 286 had and others that went on 386/486/Pentiums etc?

Thanks
Anybody else

Silent Monkey

Don't recall ever seeing a 3.5" floppy with an edge connector as native, plenty that had an adapter to convert the floppy connector to fit the edge connector on the cable though.

msp1

SM - any idea where to I can buy an adaptor?

Mike

Silent Monkey

I'll have some laying around here, I'm a squirrel
Do I assume you have a box with a faulty floppy drive but the cable has a different connector to that on a "normal" 1.44MB floppy?
If so you may already have the adapter fitted to the faulty drive.
The other possibility is that a 286 may not support a 1.44MB floppy although the vast majority did.

Mail me an address as per my profile, I'll find an adapter and post it to you tomorrow.

msp1

Mr Silent Monkey

YHM

Mike

JoeyDeacon

Or if you want to approach the problem from a different angle...

Take the hard-drive out of the 286, connect it to your machine and backup the files from there.

You obviously haven't had to deal with old crappy hardware before! Many years ago I formatted a machine on a customers site only to find the CD rom was running through the soundcard and obviously I had no drivers for the soundcard to get the CD rom working. Ended up taking the Hard drive out of the PC, inserting it into another PC and copying the CAB files from onto the hard drive. Put the hard drive back into the other PC and ran setup from the hard-drive. I was VERY relieved once the installation had finished to find Windows 95 had detected the sound card and CD Rom drive and installed the corect drivers for both.