>>>>I'm growing old. Mixed this up :) Even unable to get the alphabet right .... O.k. I clean up the office today so I can not do much harm to my apps :)
>>>>
>>>>dbase II? I've started with the GDR dbase II copy ... 360kb Floppy had not enough space for more then two tables ....
>>>
>>>What? You didn't find the trick how to format them to 720K? Tsk, tsk...
>>>
>>>Does anyone know how to read these floppies nowadays? I got a motherboard with a proper socket (incredible, nowadays), got the drive, got the cable... just don't know how to cheat the BIOS into reading them.
>>
>>Those where the ones punched on the second side to put them upsidedown in the drive. Odd CP/M floppy formats? At least these compe where equiped with a chamber to erase EPROMS
>
>Nope, those were the 180k for C64... which then became 360k.
>
>I've even found some soviet (or was it a little later... it came to me in 1992) DOS utility which does something to disable INT3. At the time I managed, with it, to read a 640K formatted CP/M floppy... well, almost. It would always read whole blocks, so there was always some garbage between original and current eof(). But even that won't read this 720k format because it seems the current BIOSes don't use INT3 anymore. So I'm looking for something from around 1998-2003 to still have old-style BIOS, but some disk or USB that's transferrable to today's boxes, just to read those 40 floppies.

I haven't read the whole thread, don't know exactly what type of floppies you're trying to read.

This looks like an interesting place to start: http://www.retrotechnology.com/herbs_stuff/s_drives_howto.html

You might be able to find someone with an old machine from the period you specify. I have a running one from around 1997 which I fire up a couple of times a year - originally had NT 3.51 on it, then Win2K, now Server 2003 R2. It has a 3.5" floppy but never had a 5.25" drive.

Maybe you have computer recyclers in your area, they might be a source for old machines or parts. Or maybe eBay if all else fails.