Too soon.

I'd like to claim the "tl;dr" was ironic, but actually I intended to make my response in two parts with the summary first. 20 minutes later I forgot all about that and the tl;dr. :-) When I bought my Kryoflux unit, I had to wait for it to be made. They were very kind with my whining. I've been impressed with pretty much everything about the company.

I went through this problem a couple of years back, and it's only gotten worse since then of course. I'll give you the tl;dr blurb first... you ARE going to end up here: KryoFlux Products & Services Ltd.[^] Save yourself a LOT of trouble and start with these guys, the documention alone is both necessary and sufficient, but you might as well just bite the bullet and buy their dedicated hardware because the other bad news is that a lot of your media is going to be bad. Their USB generic flux-sensing floppy controller is very powerful and surprisingly inexpensive and the software is free for non-commercial use (and ridiculously expensive for commercial use.) Along the way I discovered that if you don't go the Kryoflux route you will also need an older motherboard with a BIOS that supports 5.25" drives if you will be trying to read them. The only way to tell if this is the case is to power it up and look in the settings. I had a mountain of used MB's laying around and I had to dig down a couple of feet to find one. (8-10 years old at least? How long ago did Gateway croak?) It turned out that almost all of my media was useless, although I haven't made it through all of them. (1000 or so mixed 3.5, 5.25, 180K to 1.2M.) Totally my fault, the A/C went out in my storage shed and it didn't occur to me until it was far too late than this was ruining my floppies, including distribution media from practically every major PC software package and OS from 1982 until CD's took over. I'm crying a little now.) My next project, and it's a failure so far, is recovering data from a dozen or so MFM hard drives. Data for that is even more scarce, and so far no samaritan with a hardware solution which is probably what it's going to take.) Hi, my name is Matt and I'm a data hoarder.

Most BIOSes dropped support for 5.25" floppies a decade before they dropped support for 3.5". And if you're trying to do anything with 5.25" disks, you'll need that old BIOS. I had go to several layers deep in my pile of motherboards before I found one that worked. Good luck with that.

Yeah, Heinlein was even very specific about his sliderules being made of bamboo. (Sun Hemi?)

"To a boy with a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail".

No, money isn't everything, but it's not nothing either. You can't buy happiness but money can make misery a HELL of a lot more comfortable.