Installing a 5 1/4" floppy in an Inspiron 530

Update: I didn't really want to format anything; I just wanted to recover data from a friend's old floppies. The drive will consistently read certain other (expendable) disks (including 360K ones) and consistently not certain others,  including the ones I want to recover the data from. In some cases it says "Please insert a disk," On others it says that the disk needs to be formatted but when I try (on the expendable ones) it says "The disk media is not recognized. It may not be formatted," or it just says explorer is restarting. I have no way of knowing if any of the disks are bad or how bad. Any ideas?

Sorry, I messed up--the drive reads 1.2M diskettes just fine; it's the 360Ks that it won't read. Any fix for that that you know of? 

Hi

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how2-read-a-360-k-floppy-in-a-aieLIwklQvG1ZSAGWb7gSQ

A snippet............

Use Compatible Software:

• Tools like fdcontrol (on FreeBSD) or DOS utilities (FORMAT /4) can help configure the drive for proper operation with 360 KB disks.

Can you find a 360 k Floppy drive to install?

Here's a daft idea.........

https://winworldpc.com/product/dr-dos/6x

Try the above, run it in compatibility mode perhaps, or write it to a floppy.

It may be possible that if the only drive that is connected (your HDD/SSD are unplugged) then it could become a boot device, failing that try writing to a USB stick.

If in doubt please ask.

Update: A friend let me borrow his Athlon 64 machine, which has a bios provision for 360K floppies. I installed the drive and it copied all the files from two of the four disks no problem. The other two are dead in the water. They were probably written originally on the same drive as the ones that did read; one is even the same brand and catalog #. So far I have been unable to find anything that will read them.  Windows asks if I want to format them. Winhex won't open them and neither will debug with the L command.  All the data recovery programs I've tried failed; some don't even recognize that the drive is present. Back in 1992 I was in a computer class in which we were able to read floppies like that by copying the boot record from a good one and force-writing it onto the bad one using some kind of debug script, but I don't have my notes anymore. I can't believe the instructor was the only man who knew the trick (I lost track of him and he's probably deceased by now). I'd rather not try Greaseweazle as I've already got too much money into this project and its output doesn't preserve file structure or formatting. Any thoughts? 

Hi

If a HEX editor could access them, theoretically you could "copy and paste" in the boot sector from a working disk.

Possibly they were/are formatted for an a now defunct OS, like a BBC Micro et al, and not likely recoverable.

So Sorry I am out of of ideas.

Thanks for responding. Now things have taken a turn for the worse in that the setup refuses to copy files off any 360K disks, even ones it did before, regardless of settings. It does fine on 1.2M disks, but on 360s; though it will list the files, it will neither open them nor copy them. Under Winhex it shows mostly bad sectors but the initial bad sectors are exactly the same ones regardless of which 360K disk I put in. Best I can figure is: though the BIOS will do 360K drives, the motherboard and its controller are strictly set up for 1.44M. It will do 1.2M because it's close enough re the way the data is written (another computer I tried is like that), but 360K is too far off. The fact that it once read the two 360s may have been some kind of fluke (divine intervention?). 

Probably my next move will be Greaseweazle since that is a lot cheaper than an old computer with real 360K drives or whatever. 

Hi

My parting shot .....

HOW2 Recover Files, Folders & Partitions using TESTDISK.

Initially you need Linux Mint or similar, used as a LIVE environment, that means it runs in RAM and does not install until you request it. It runs a tad slower and perhaps a little lumpier, but nevermind.

https://www.linuxmint.com/download.php …….from a local mirror

https://mirrors.ukfast.co.uk/sites/linuxmint.com/isos/stable/22.1/linuxmint-22.1-cinnamon-64bit.iso

https://mirrors.univ-reims.fr/IMAGES/mint/stable/22.1/linuxmint-22.1-cinnamon-64bit.iso

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wmbgwyl0EEg

Then use Rufus et al to put it on an 8 or 16 GB USB memory stick, which you can then BOOT from.

The tiny black icon with a $_ symbol, is what you click on, and an ugly looking terminal opens.

TestDisk is not installed by default, you need to use… sudo apt update && sudo apt install testdisk

Then, if you connected during the boot process to a Wi-Fi network, it installs, run with sudo testdisk

It is a LO-Cost/NO-Cost potential solution.