Interesting. Will it just say DS#### on the chip on the board? I’ll look for it, that sounds great. Some parts of this board are hard to reach though.

This is what I was thinking too. The adapter I have does have its own power supply plugged in to molex. But it turns off when I also plug in usb.

I can’t find the coin cell cmos battery on the board…

Someone here said NetBSD could work. Another person sent a link to someone who did manage to get linux on a floppy disk, that could work.

Honestly I have no idea. It’s further down on my want-to-do list, and the only thing I can personally think of (without having done any research on it) is like linux from scratch, or a similar source version where I disable almost every kernel feature, and suffer through finding the right settings to enable for this hardware.

We’ll see how far I get. I mean if I can just do copy file \\.\COM# on the DOS side and cat /dev/tty# > file on my laptop side then I’ll be happy.

Thanks for that. Looked online a bit, I’m going to order an rs232 to usb null modem cable. Then it looks like in DOS I should be able to set the baud and just copy a file to the port. On the receiving side I can program something to just read from the com port straight to a file. Add some automation and voila. 🤞

Right now the challenge is to get data off of my 5.25" floppy disks. Online shops are full of 3.5" to usb readers, but nothing for 5.25".

The reader in the computer still works.

I’m considering trying to send files out through the serial port, if I can figure out how to send a file to it. Then I could use anything to read from the other end of the serial port and write the file.

I want to see what (if anything) i can copy from the drive, and then I’ll give this a shot and see how much mileage I can get out of it!

The gotek looks like a cool way to add usb storage support. I’m hesitant only because this thing boots from the 3.5" drive right now so I don’t want to touch that, but if I fix the hard drive problems and it boots from there then I might do this.

I do want to get an SSD in here, a friend of mine has done it before on a similarly old windows 98 system.

I can try it out once i learn how to use this thing. I’m gonna have to get a usb floppy reader/writer to copy stuff from a modern computer.