Legacy Computer Media to USB Drives

Recover the contents of 5 ¼” floppy and 3.5″ diskette computer media

Did you discover perhaps an entire box load of 5 ¼” floppy disks that you had forgotten about? Is your only clue about their contents what is written on the label (if that)? Is it possible that the contents may be of interest to you today? At W. Cardone Productions we have modern computer resources to retrieve the contents of these legacy computer storage media of days gone by. Further, our manner of retrieving data from such legacy media includes the option for us to read data on a sector basis for those floppies that may have become magnetically corrupt during their time in storage.

Here is How it Works

When you bring us your legacy media, we will produce a directory listing (a table of contents, so to speak) of the contents. We will then either email it to you or put it up on a password-protected login we give you on our web site for you to review. You will then be able to review that directory listing to make your decision on if the data from that disk is of interest to you. If you decide there is nothing of interest to you, you owe nothing. You only pay if you ask us to retrieve the data from that disk or diskette.

For 3.5″ diskettes there are modern USB drives you can obtain from Amazon or most any other hardware distributor. While we do make ourselves available to processes these, it is likely easier and cheaper if you purchase one of these USB devices and do the work yourself. They are really quite simple to use, just plug and play.

The story, however, is quite a bit different for 5 1/4″ (5.25″) floppies. To our knowledge, there is nothing available on a plug-and-play basis anywhere on the planet for these. That may seem strange until you consider the nature of the 5.25″ floppy and its history. This floppy was already in use long before the advent of the famed IBM PC. Consequently, there are as many different formats that these were recorded in. While there certainly would be a market for such a USB device, its deployment and subsequent customer call-in numbers would be another matter. A 5.25″ floppy used for the Atari 810 is the same physical device used by the much more used IBM PC but it was recorded with a different format.

When we talk 5.25″ floppy disks we naturally think of MS-DOS and Windows. Many of us may have forgotten some of the legacy machines of yesteryear that predated the IBM PC. We are able to work with virtually every 5.25″ floppy format known to man! Below is a list of those formats that we are readily able to process.