Yes. You could make your own magnetics value reader which would also be a functional drive but perhaps not 'fully' in that it might be slow etc. For example you

Yes. You could make your own magnetics value reader which would also be a functional drive but perhaps not 'fully' in that it might be slow etc. For example you could make a high resolution x,y table with a read head that made a flux map and the you could post process this into the data. Using an existing floppy drive seems so much more practical for the job of data recovery.