I still have some 5 1/4" floppies and I wanted to read them (if still possible at all). I still have an old drive, even an HD 1.2MB one.
However, it's literally impossible to find USB to 5 1/4" floppy interfaces now in Europe. I only found one outfit in the US that sells them, but they refused to ship to europe :(
If anyone has any tips I'd appreciate it because I'm pretty lost now.. I have much old hardware but nothing that can drive a 5 1/4" floppy drive. It's mostly unixy stuff like HP9000's and Macs.
If you’re willing to buy/be given/dumpster dive some e-waste, there are endless old-but-not-vintage PC motherboards that can be had for minimal money (like, $10-20 with CPU and RAM) that will still accept a 5.25” floppy drive and will still run a modern Windows or Linux for ease of transfer. Think Core 2 era. I have a HP Z400 workstation from ~2010 that will take a floppy drive. Beware though because some machines will be BIOS/chipset limited to only accept 3.5” 1.4MB drives. I think my HP is one of those.
EDIT: actually, no, I just looked it up — the Z400 will take a 1.2MB 5.25” drive. It will not take DD drives of any kind.
If you have the drive, you can probably bit-bang the interface pins with a Raspberry Pi or the like. There might already be something in a dusty corner of GitHub for this, or it would be a fun little project for anyone with hobbyist-level EE skills.
I've had very bad experiences with those. Most vendors don't want to send to those either and then cancel orders that were already paid, and it was a hassle to get my money back.
However, it's literally impossible to find USB to 5 1/4" floppy interfaces now in Europe. I only found one outfit in the US that sells them, but they refused to ship to europe :(
If anyone has any tips I'd appreciate it because I'm pretty lost now.. I have much old hardware but nothing that can drive a 5 1/4" floppy drive. It's mostly unixy stuff like HP9000's and Macs.