My technical question is this, the USB 3.5 inch drive I have is a "USB Portable Diskette Drive" that was Made in China but has no obvious sponsoring branding. If I take the time to bring back to life a more period correct system with an actual IDE floppy drive would it read the disks more accurately?
My goal is to get more of this good DOS and early Windows educational software working for my children. This particular title is meaningful because I have the actual boxes and learned on it myself all those years ago.
One option for hardware is my parent's Leading Edge WinPro 486. The case looks to be in good shape but I have not opened the case to see the condition of the capacitors yet. It has a natively mounted 3.5 and 5.25 inch drive.
PaulHoule•32m ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KryoFlux
which might let you get most of the bits from a bad block. See
https://goughlui.com/2013/04/21/project-kryoflux-part-1-the-...
rietta•20m ago
Before I spend well over $100 importing that device, I previously was thinking of brining up a 2001 era motherboard with a USB stack and can natively host the drives, but the 486 that has sat unused may be a solid option. I presumably can find a way to transfer data to a modern system over serial cable or something.