>As retirement approaches and I'm close to 10 years since I started writing some kind of autobiography (in an app I wrote in VFP!), I'm filling some gaps in my archives. Last year I got my hands on one of the last usable 5,25" floppy drives, and I'm lucky to have a rather new motherboard which accepts a floppy. Plugged it in and it works!
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>However, it doesn't recognize all formats - only the 1.2M HD and the 360K. Which is about one third of my archive (a full shoebox). The remainder are the HDDD formatted floppies, 720K. It doesn't recognize them at all, says "insert a disk".
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>Now theoretically I could lay my hands on some 20 year old box, but then I wonder what my options of bringing the contents from that to my current box would be? The NICs of the time were strictly BNC, the serial connection was pre-USB. Perhaps swapping some old IDE disk would work - may be worth a try.
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>I tried doing this from Ubuntu (VM but then it was hosted in W7), from several VMs, including some minimal ones running FreeDos and such, no dice. Perhaps now that I'm running Ubuntu as host (and others as VMs), it may allow it, which I doubt - back then I booted into that from a flash drive, same result. I'd rather like to know if there may be some option to make my current hardware allow for that format, i.e. bypass the current BIOS limitation.

There's some interesting reading if you Google [how to read 5.25 720k floppy]

Those were the semi Wild West days where there were lots of different drive parameters for the various diskette formats e.g. http://www.retrotechnology.com/herbs_stuff/drive.html#720K . As I see it:

- the drive must be capable of running using the parameters expected by the floppy media
- the BIOS must be capable of setting those parameters. ISTR with old BIOSs (at least with PCs) you could select the floppy drive type from a list. But if your format isn't in the list you're basically SOL

An old machine may be the best bet to get a combination of drive + firmware that can read your floppies. If you can boot it into DOS at least, you should be able to install the NDIS TCP/IP stack for modern-ish networking. I think 20 years ago was around the time that NICs were just starting to be available with 10BASE-T, or combination BNC/10BASE-2 and 10BASE-T. There were also some hubs/switches that were combination BNC/UTP so if you can only find a BNC NIC you might be able to use one of those combo hubs to connect to your current box.

If the floppies were something else (e.g. CP/M) that could be tricky. CP/M machines for one basically had no concept of data transfer to dissimilar systems. Although Googling there seems to be Kermit clients for CP/M FWIW. You'd likely be looking at serial comms. FTP is likely too much to ask for, maybe some BBS software?