It’s hard to say if you will ever get a reply on this one.. WHy in the good lords name would one ever even try this? My feeling on it is that as 5.25 disks were at the end of thier shelf life with the advent of 3.1, Microsoft wouldn’t have bothered including support for them in ’98. However, you can make your DOS devices run fine in Windows if you configure them properly… The question then really is, how can I get Windows 98 to recognize that my 5.25 drive is a viable disk drive?

This one genuinely boggles the mind…

Hope that helps!

If you go to the MSDOS prompt and type Format /? you should see that Format /4 allows you to format a 5.25 inch (360kb). At least that is what I see in Windows ME. I would be very surprised if support was removed, but I would be even more surprised if anybody wanted to make any use of such discs.

What about 8″ (I think) drives, remember those.

Andrew C

I think you win.

I have a PC that’s been upgraded several times. We bought it in 1994-95. Even at that time, 5.25″ floppies were no longer standard so we paid extra for it. The upgrades have included a new motherboard (about 2-3 yrs ago), memory, several hard disks, new CD-ROM, new 3.5 floppy drive, and several versions of windows. We have never upgraded the 5.25″ disk (it never “broke” since we don’t use it a whole lot).

And it still works with Windows 98, which is what we are running now. No new drivers were needed. We still use it on occasion to read 5.25″ disks, of which we still have a few. A friend used it about 2-3 months ago for that reason (his PC being too new to have a 5.25″ floppy).

Fred

Yes they do. My first thought when I read this was the same – why do you want to? Then I remembered getting a stack of 5.25 inchers from a new client that had the source code for his primary business system on them. The local retailer gave me a used drive and I hooked it up (without even bolting it in), got the files I needed, and threw the drive away.

Bottom line, it works, if ya gotta.

why would someone throw out a good 5.25″ Floppy drive when you could sell it?

A friend asked me to look at a desktop PC in early 2020 that was running W98, and yes I can verify that it had a 5.25 inch and a 3.5 inch floppy drive.  We tested each drive just to see if they worked, and they spun up and read the disks.

By the way, some military hardware might still be using floppies

5.25″ floppy disk drives were fully supported in Windows up to and including Windows XP SP1. Note that one would have to use the correct parameters for the format command.

Apparently XP SP2 and SP3 removed full support for 5.25″ floppy disks by changing the flpydisk.sys driver. Supposedly one can copy and replace the flpydisk.sys driver in XP SP2 or SP3 with the flpydisk.sys from SP1 in order to regain formatting capability. I have never tested this.

Interestingly, XP did not support formatting 3.5″ 720KB floppies unless special drivers were installed. Back in those olden days, people used to purchase a punch tool which would create the square shaped notch hole which would allow both sides of a 3.5″ 720KB floppy disk to be formatted as a 3.5″ 1.44MB disk in 1.44MB floppy drives.

Notably, Windows 7 can read and write to 5.25″ floppies. Windows 7 cannot format 5.25″ floppies.

Floppy drives did not use the IDE interface. The interface and connector cables for floppy drives are different than IDE.

Which begs the question – assuming that (like me) you have a 5.25 drive, and cables, is it possible to get an interface that works on a modern motherboard?   I’ve kept an old computer around for that purpose but I need to clean out the basement – but wouldn’t mind keeping the possibility of access the 5.25 for a while…..