Option 3: Use an Internal Floppy Drive with a Cheap USB Adapter A Sony USB floppy drive, for example, will work with any Windows PC when connected to a USB port.

You don’t need a drive that matches your PC, despite the branding.

Windows 10 still recognizes most of them as plug-and-play devices.

We recommend looking for a “Sony USB floppy drive” on eBay and trying your luck with one of those.

They’re also new enough to work without needing to be repaired.

These vintage drives are made with much higher-quality components than the cheap USB drives currently available on Amazon. Many slim laptop manufacturers (such as HP, Sony, and Dell) also produced external USB floppy drives in the late 1990s and early 2000s.Make sure you’re comfortable putting your valuable data on a drive that costs only a few dollars to make. So, before you start reading, take a look at some of the reviews. However, in our experience, the unreliability of these drives is often frustrating.So this might be worth a shot if you’re in a hurry and need a plug-and-play solution for just one or two discs. Many modern USB 3.5-inch floppy drives are inexpensive (ranging from $10 to $30) and can be found on Amazon, Newegg, or even eBay.We’ll go over the options in order of difficulty.Īlso See: how to use windows file history to back up your data Option 1: Use a New USB Floppy Drive As a result, there are a plethora of semi-modern drives and solutions. Unfortunately, long after their 1.44 MB capacity had become absurdly small in relative terms, 3.5-inch floppy drives remained a legacy product. You’re in luck if you have MS-DOS or Windows 3.5-inch floppy discs that you want to copy to a modern Windows 10 or Windows 7 PC. How to Copy Files From a 3.5-Inch Floppy Drive to a Modern PC You’ll have to figure out how to use emulators like DOSBox or other utilities to access or convert the data, which is beyond the scope of this article. Unfortunately, it may be locked in old file formats that modern software can’t read. You must be able to read the data once you have copied it.

The task at hand-copying data from an old floppy disc to a modern computer-is only half the battle. You should be aware of a major caveat before we begin.

There’s a Catch: Copying Data Is the Easy Part On a modern Windows PC or Mac, here’s how to access a vintage 3.5- or 5.25-inch floppy disc. They were eventually replaced, and floppy disc drives were no longer found in new computers. Here we can see, “How to Read a Floppy Disk on a Modern PC or Mac”ĭo you recall floppies? They were necessary back in the day.

Cant read 3.5 floppy disk formats