External Floppy Drive

"Can you get a wire, so I can connect my old floppy drive from my windows 3.1, to my windows xp home center edition?"

Yes I can, in fact I already have a wire.......

You will have to get a 4 wire power connector cable AND a multiple ribbon cable that fits the floppy drive. If at all possible the floppy should be mounted in the new PC's case. Can you salvage them from you your old 3.1? Aslo there may be a spare connector on the existing ribbon cable in yur new machine.

No, the old machine is long gone, but I kept the floppy drive

Did you check inside the newer machine? Usually, there are several drive connectors -- both power and ribbon cables. Ordinarily, adding a drive does not require additional cables.

Buddy, if you can't spend on the external floppy drive on USB, you can just borrow, or take your floppys to your friend and copy/burn them on the CD and take the CD and save on your computer. easiest way

why, they can't store enough data to be worth while to use

Maybe he has a bunch of floppy discs with information on them that he needs to read. Is there a way to handle that situation?

See Post #1

I can understand this one, I had the same problem when adding a SATA HDD to my PC. The set up needed to install the drivers but would only look on the floppy drive to find them. I had to temporarily install a floppy drive to get over this but as suggested previously, all the cables were in place inside the PC.

Does your new PC even have a floppy connector on the Main board? If not, you need to buy a USB floppy as already suggested....

If you understand nothing about computers and how to NOT damage the internals, just go and buy a USB floppy and throw the other one in the rubbish.....

Although I have never had or seen a main board without the power and data connectors for a floppy drive, I believe they do exist. Its a shame that you did not at least keep the flat data cable that was attached to the floppy from your old PC main board....if the connection had existed, you would not have any more problems (as long as you connected it the right way round! Wrong way round does not damage anything though, it just does not work correctly !!)

Also, USB floppy drives are not only exceedingly cheap (about €20 In Germany), but if I understand the technical brochure correctly, they are also faster.....! Whether that just meant the interface or the drive data as well was not completely clear!!

Its sad that a company writes software (Hap I believe had such a problem?) that ONLY looks at the floppy drive for data, if true, then that company are certainly living in the past.

If you are using XP or later, usually though, you can redirect the search to a CD or even a file or directory on a hard disk without too much trouble.....of course if the PC is old or the Windows is old, there might be problems......but I would guess that most PCs, that are 5 years old or younger, you can cause them to boot via the BIOS from a CD, so pulling drivers off a CD also should be possible.....

My advice is check your main board for a connector for floppies and decide on how to proceed from that point onwards.....

Happy Christmas.