A few hours ago, somebody asked me to help them access their 5.25" floppy MSDOS backup files. at a remote location. The obvious solution would be an USB external 5.25" drive and DOSBOX, assuming it supports MSDOS RESTORE (and the 5.25" media was still readable, of course). Strangely enough, it seems such an animal has never been made, either as a commercial product or as an open source hack, though I have seen rumours of a long ago limited production device.

My first thought was to find an external 3.5" USB device and rewire it to a 5.25" internal drive, but it seems the formats are different enought that they won't use the same controller. I haven't given up on this approach, I've got a dual 3.5" and 5.25" drive that might just work, I last used it on a 1GHz machine...

The topic has come uip time after time on the 'net, with no clear resolution, as illustrated below. Would make a great hack, especially if it supported 8" drives!