If you’ve ever wondered if it was possible to run a 5.25” floppy drive under Windows 7, I have recently proven that such a feat is possible. In fact, I have managed to transform my PC into the ultimate media reading machine.
Installed and working in my PC; I currently have a 5.25” floppy, a 3.5” floppy, an Iomega Zip100 drive, two CD/DVD RW drives, an SD card reader and a Blue Ray reader. All of this hardware is connected to a Gigabyte GA-P55-UD3 motherboard, which boasts a core i7 processor and a 64-bit install of Windows 7 professional. As you can see it is easily possible to run legacy media devices on a modern system.
If you want to build your own media PC here are a few pointers to get you going:
Motherboard FDD Controller is a Must
As new motherboards are being produced manufacturers are increasingly turning away from built-in floppy controllers. If you plan on obtaining a 5.25” floppy drive it is absolutely essential that you purchase a motherboard that still supports this legacy technology – after all you can buy a 3.5” USB floppy drive but I have yet to see a USB 5.25” drive!Configuring your BIOS to support the 5.25” floppy drive is actually pretty easy, if your motherboard is anything like mine it should have an entry for 360kb and for a 1.2mb 5.25” drive. Note that 1.2mb drives are backwards-compatible with 360kb floppy discs.
Multiple Floppies will Require one to be a USB
There is an increasing trend among motherboard manufacturers to only support a single floppy drive on the built-in controller. There are some folks on the Internet who have suggested modified BIOS as the answer. I have opted to take a slightly easier approach. I took a basic 3.5” USB floppy and modified it to fit inside a standard 3.5” bay adapter. This resulted in the USB cable being located inside the case. I drilled a small hole in one of my PCI cards so the USB cable could be connected to a free port on the back of my case.Of course this could have been accomplished by using an extra USB header on my motherboard, but alas, I had no extra headers to spare.
Most Devices use IDE Connections
My Zip drive, along with two of my DVD drives use the old IDE connection to interface with the motherboard.
The IDE interface uses a 40 pin ribbon cable to connect your drives to the motherboard. Fortunately, even though this is a legacy technology, most new motherboards still have an IDE controller built into them. A standard IDE controller can only support two devices termed "master" and "slave." The position of the drive on the cable determines which it is; the "master" drive occupies the upper connection while the "slave" drive occupies the lower. On most IDE devices there is a jumper which determines weather the device is a master or a slave - make sure you have this jumper configured correctly BEFORE you turn on your computer.
SATA Connections
The Serial-ATA (or SATA) interface is the most modern way of connecting drives to your computer.
With SATA devices you don't have to worry about which is master and which is slave, the computer can automatically decide. The only problem is - because the SATA interface is so new most old school drives won't have a connection. For this reason an IDE-to-SATA adapter has been developed.
I have had good success with the StarTech SATA-IDE adapter but other brands work as well.
