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Using Standard floppy disk drives in PS/2's

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Chromedome45

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I have found out that it is possible to use a standard floppy drive in a PS/2 computer. But one little gotcha is I have not tested this using the card edge type connections in the Model 30 or Model 70. I have tested this in my Model P70 and it works fine. What you have to do is seperate and cut wires #3 = 5volt, #6 = 12v and I used #5 for ground from a floppy cable.Cut the twisted part off at the end of the first connector using a utility knife so you have a short ribbon cable minus the twisted end. I then removed a 3-1/2" floppy drive power cable from an old power supply. First strip and tin the 4 wires of the power cabel. Tie the 2 black wires together then solder them together. This is the ground connection. Take a length of heat shrink tubing and place onto the 2 black wire pair. Solder the 2 black wires to pin #5 on the ribbon cable and shrink the tubing around the connection. Next take the Yellow wire and place heat shrink tubing onto the wire and solder to pin #6. and shrink tubing around this connection. This is the +12volt connection. Next take the Red wire and place shrink tubing around it and solder to pin #3 and shrink the tubing around connection this is the +5volt connection. I have tested this with a Teac 235HF, Alps and mitsumi drives without any problems. Disks format and read fine. I hope this may help some people out who have had problems getting a cheap replacement drive for the PS/2's. :) Minor clarification about shrink tubing. Place 3 pieces of tubing around the 4 power leads. 1 Piece for the two black wires and one around the red and yellow wire. After you have soldered the wire to the ribbon cable slide down shrink tubing and using a heat source shrink over the connection point. Prevents shorts! I hope this clarifies things a bit. Pictures added to see what I'm talking about. I was just looking at the 40 pin edge connector like that used in the model 30 and 70 and it looks to be almost as easy as this! :p
 

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May sound confusing, but I'd love to figure out how to do the reverse. I can find IBM 2.88MB floppies by the yard, but they won't work in a standard PC. heh
 
Would just need to do the opposite of what I did above. Cut out #3,#5,#6 and solder in a power connector to the drive side. The cable side just get those wires away from the 3 with power. Recap pin 3 is 5volts pin 5 is Ground pin 6 is 12volts. Red=5volts, black=ground,Yellow=12volts. In theory this should work. :)
 
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I just figured this out myself using the pinouts for ps/2 and standard pc floppy drives... I should have come here sooner to save some time! (I spent about an hour until I figured out that pin1 is GND according to pinouts on the PS/2, but really is not connected. So it is important to use pin5 as you do!)

Now my drive does not seem to work in the PS/2 P70: It spins up and tries to read from the reference disk but then the drive just keeps spinning and changing the led from red to green and back repeatedly. At this point the P70 just hangs and waits, only after removing the floppy will i go to the ROM basic.
Any ideas? Did you have any non-working drives? I should probably get some other floppy drives to test with.

Thanks for posting this!
 
DreadStorm said:
May sound confusing, but I'd love to figure out how to do the reverse. I can find IBM 2.88MB floppies by the yard, but they won't work in a standard PC. heh
Click to expand...

Yeah, precisely.
I'll keep this thread in mind if I get an IBM 2.88MB drive. For now, lack of compatibility prevented me from getting an IBM one. Generic 2.88s were too expensive. I'll give it a shot if I come up across a cheap IBM one on the net.
 
mdx said:
Any ideas? Did you have any non-working drives? I should probably get some other floppy drives to test with.
Click to expand...

I just had success with an old TEAC drive. I had to clean it, but in the end it worked.
The non-working drive was a Compaq-labelled drive (I couldn't find a manufacturer on the outside and didn't open up this drive.)

Now the TEAC drive has a different eject button and the original blue one doesn't fit it. Did you find any drives that can take the original eject button? This is just a minor detail, but it would be nice to have the original looks :)
 
Good luck with that... I suspect you'll have to rig something up yourself if you'd like to use that original blue eject button.
 
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