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I've got a wobbly desk.

I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!

As long as your machine can see it, it works well. Just don't lose it Smile | :)

I went through some serious hoop jumping trying to get an enclosure for my SSD, a Samsung SM961, PCIe 3.0x4. It's a bit faster than your generic SSDs, but it has some unique connector requirements and enclosures are pricey.

I have a friend who has gone to all virtual machines, and he just carries around a couple of USB 3.0 enclosures. Apparently the system works well for him.

Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...

"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759

This is not a programming problem, even though it is a software thing - so kick me in the right direction, if the question doesn't belong here...

I've got quite a few boxes of old floppies that I want to go throught before throwing them away. I've got a USB floppy station.

In the old days when floppies were the standard, lots of floppy manufacturers sold "pre formatted" floppies ready to use. But they didn't write the format code (360K, 720K, 1.44M...) in the boot sector. Don't ask me why - it is true that Good Old DOS (GOD) didn't require it: If reading according to one format failed, another format was tried, and another, until reading succeeded. 16-bit Windows (i.e. up until W98) followed suit. With Win32, MS declared that "Enough is enough!". In XP and later versions, a floppy without a proper format code is considered "Not formatted".

I could fire up that old W98 wreck down in the basement to spin through all those old floppies. The machine is really old, so moving the rescued files over to my current machine today raises another set of problems. I'd rather find another solution.

So, my request is: Can anyone point me to some software letting a Win7 or Win10 machine read a floppy from a USB floppy drive, even when the floppy disk does not have a format code written into the boot sector as it should have?

I have no experience but have you explored running win 98 in a virtual machine?

here's one tutorial for w95: https://medium.com/@johngreenfield/how-to-setup-and-install-windows-95-in-a-virtual-machine-326654b0f670

I dunno if it'll let you talk to the usb-floppy, but worth a try.

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95/98 might be overkill, if it's just to copy files from a floppy to another location (say, a virtual hard drive, formatted as FAT). I've had DOS install just fine on Hyper-V, but 95/98 have always failed for me (with Hyper-V, that is - thought I remember using it with VMware).

The first thing Windows says is somehting like "This disk is not formattet - do you want to format it?" I have to get beyond that point to copy the files on the floppy to another location. And once I get beyond that, the problem is solved.

As long as any current Windows floppy driver is involved, I can't get access to the files on the floppy.

So the host OS gets a crack at it before the VM? That's kinda messed up.

I've kept around old machines, but not that old. I have a USB floppy drive somewhere, and I know I have DOS install disks (or at least a bootable DOS disk), so maybe I wouldn't be completely stuck if I needed to do that. Although I have to seriously wonder if those floppies still work.

I haven't actually checked out this combination. It depends on the virtualization. Usually, VMs do not have their own drivers for every single hardware device that is out there; it makes use of the host's device drivers, at a low level. Different VM technologies vary in how low level - drivers are structured in multiple layers. The term "driver" is a most ambiguous term.

If the VM software goes all the way down to the drivers for every piece of hardware, without any support from the host system, it really isn't a virtualization layer but an OS core that provides multiple isolated API environments, possibly of different types.

Where does the "OS provided device driver" end and the "host OS" begin? That is also a very ambiguous issue. The VM may use the host OS to provide control over the disk as cylinders and tracks, but manage the sector format itself. Or the OS may provide the disk as an unstructured stream of bytes. Or one of several in-between levels.

As the floppy disk format really describes the disk at the cylinder/track level, its interpretation belongs in the very low driver layers. I woudn't expect a VM anno 2019 to implement drivers for the Shugart 34-pin floppy interface - legacy demands on Windows are probably still strong enough that they keep it in there. What you suggest is that the VM implements the physical layer driver (if it is prepared to do that for arbitrary USB floppy formats, I would expect it to be available for a Shugart interface as well), but not take the responsibility for track and sectors. Or at least allow me to take control over stepper motor and disk rotation ... in a "virtual machine". To me, that isn't much of a virtualization Smile | :)

You may be right, but I doubt it. I would think that the majority of VM technologies that can handle floppies make use of host provided drivers at the bottom layers. If those drivers can't handle the sectors and tracks because there is no information available, I would expect the VM to be lost as well.

That was my concern too, the host would say "ahh, this is a disk drive, so these are the parameters, here you go VM..."

OTOH I've had VM's talk to devices that the host didn't understand (custom sensors), perhaps disabling the USB-Floppy driver in the host might let it pass through as an "unknown device,"
... but then my next fear would be without custom drivers (as I had in my case) the win 95/98 probably may not know what an "unknown-?USB?-thing" is either.

But if no luck elsewhere I'd try VirtualBox, I've found it's generally best at passing through devices. It's free apart from a bit of you time invested to download and install/setup.

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Might also try Linux in a VM, that supports USB floppy. Gparted will show the format.

If you can keep your head while those about you are losing theirs, perhaps you don't understand the situation.

Installing a VM, installing Linux on that VM, ... Maybe booting up the W98 machine is less work, after all Smile | :)

Take a look at WinImage, it's shareware and can turn old floppies into disk images: What is WinImage[^]
Another option is PowerISO: PowerISO[^]

modified 9-Mar-19 15:32pm.

Overwrite the bootsector, simple enough.

Bastard Programmer from Hell Suspicious | :suss:

If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.

just go to electronic store to get a floppy disk drive, just $10.
it has USB interface. you can use it on any machine now...

diligent hands rule....

That's what I did. That's what doesn't work. Because Window reads the boot sector and finds no valid format code written to the disk. It then does NOT try all the different alternatives, the way DOS and Win16 dit, but bluntly rejects the entire floppy. No matter which floppy drive you buy, it won't simulate a format code that isn't on the disk.

I've never heard of that problem. I read some old 5.25" floppies with Win7 with no issues on my previous system.

Sadly, I didn't locate a motherboard with floppy interface when I built this Win 10 system last summer.

Maybe because you back in the old days formatted all the floppies yourself. Then a proper format code was written to the disk.

In the (very) old days, floppies were totally unformatted when you bought them, you had to format them yourself. When you bought yourself a new 10-pack and wanted to prepare them all for use, you'd spend a significant fraction of the afternoon waiting for the job to complete. (And remember: In the DOS days, you couldn't use your PC for anything else while waiting.)

As a service to the customers, the makers of floppy disks started selling "pre-formatted" floppies. Unfortunately, some of the largest brands failed to write a proper format code. I don't know if there might have been any logical reason not to, but that's how it was. At several occasions, I was offered batches of unused, but obsoleted software floppies: When a new software version came out, it was cheapier to ditch or give away the old version, than it would be replacing the labels and rewriting the disks. These mass produced floppies was similar, in that they lacked the format code.

My guess is that floppy writing "robots" for making ten thousand identical copies (whether blank or filled with software) per batch was such a small market that there only was one, maybe a couple, models in the market. If these machines were fed the files only, and did't themselves write the format code, it could explain why such a large fraction of pre-formatted / pre-written floppies had this defect.

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.

This might be slightly to the left of what you need but...

Found this interesting: https://support.microsoft.com/en-ca/help/140060/floppy-disk-is-not-accessible-not-formatted-or-not-recognized-by-windo[^] (basically Eddy's suggestion above)

Not sure it'd work with a USB drive though. And the article seems to suggest that you'd need to go back to Win 95.

My 2c anyways (I have the obligatory box'o'flops as well, so your post was of interest Smile | :)

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Member 7989122 wrote:
In the old days when floppies were the standard, lots of floppy manufacturers sold "pre formatted" floppies ready to use. But they didn't write the format code (360K, 720K, 1.44M...) in the boot sector. Don't ask me why - it is true that Good Old DOS (GOD) didn't require it: If reading according to one format failed, another format was tried, and another, until reading succeeded. 16-bit Windows (i.e. up until W98) followed suit. With Win32, MS declared that "Enough is enough!". In XP and later versions, a floppy without a proper format code is considered "Not formatted".

I never knew this. I've purchased plenty of these "pre-formatted" floppies, but I've never started using them without reformatting them myself first (even back then, we had already started hearing of hardware/software that shipped with some virus, so why take a chance?).

So you're saying if you bought those pre-formatted disks and just started dumping data on them (say, with DOS), XP and newer will say they're not formatted, but Win16/DOS will access them just fine. Did I get this right? If so, that's news to me.

That's right.

I did ruin a couple floppies after XP said "This disk is not formattet. Do you want to format it?", and I trusted XP, thinking that some magnetic influx had ruined them. But my experience (with both too old floppies and CD-ROMs) is that "weak" disks may fail in one reader, but succeed in another one. So before abandoning a big pile of floppies, I first tried them in my old win16 machine, and they all worked fine (except for those I had already reformatted).

At that time, I wasn't aware of the explanation for it (follow the link that Tim Deveaux gives, above), but access to machines with Win16 wasn't a problem. Now, when I am digging in old "archives" (cardboard boxes in the basement) to preserve old history, the problem is slightly bigger.

Yeah, I read that MS article from Tim as well. That was definitely interesting.

Fortunately I went through the exercise of going through all my old floppies and putting them on hard drives or CDs maybe a decade ago. Over the last few years I've done the same with my CDs and DVDs. My entire "whole-life archive" is now just under 8TB, so it fits nicely on a single drive (obviously, I have more than one, for redundancy). That goes back to DOS programs and my college notes.

In this era of mass storage, selectively deleting stuff is a waste of time.

So very long ago, I had an 286 Assembler program that did this, later updated to C. It's purpose was to rescue data from damaged floppies - sector by sector if necessary, into any number of files (displaying sectors and letting you toggle through and with 'next', 'previous', 'save' along with opening and closing new target files.

It had the option of assign-format option and also had a 'discover' option. Discover would count sides, tracks, and sectors/track - and figure out what it needed. Also, could handle 'oddly formatted' disks that had, for example, 81 tracks, discovering them even if disk info said 80.

The bad news:
But I let it go - it used direct access to the ROM Bios - and windows started to get rather upset with that. Also, areas of memory where I was no longer welcome. DOS was good.

Ravings en masse^
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Old floppies, that's been a while.

When you succeed in reading your discs you should realize that there is a strong possibility that you get read errors. These floppies were not always very reliable.

I once owned 5 computer stores and had a lot of experience with hardware, but I must say that I didn't know about the formatting issue.

A few years ago someone who once was a customer from the old days visited me asking more or less the same question.

I advised him to setup a Windows 95 or 98 machine. Make sure that the internet was accessible and email the rescued files to himself.

Because being able to access your floppies does not mean you can access the data on them in Windows 10. You still need to get the content to your new machine. If you email the content that shouldn't be a problem.

I also think that you will never get your USB floppy drive working on Windows 95/98. Windows 98 already had some USB functionality, but I don't think that you get that up and running because there was no plug and play (or should I say plug and pray) in those days.

But you question did sent me back in time when I was a young lad and purchased floppies. One disc could hold multiple games like Frogger. Nowadays it is unthinkable that you can do anything with a medium as small as 360Kb/720Kb/1.2Mb/1.44Mb or last version 2.88Mb. PS one 360Kb disc cost about US$ 5 in those days. But in the time that I used the 360Kb discs I had a 5Mb harddrive. It was as big as a shoe box. It made a clicking sound when it started up. And you could hear the discs increase velocity and you more or less expected the lights to dim because of the power usage and sound it made (which of course it didn't). Well that was totally besides the point, just a walk down memory lane.

I hope you find a solution.

If you live in The Netherlands I can borrow you a mainboard/floppy-drives/Windows CD, but I assume that you live in the states. But also where you live there must be some people that still have some 'old junk' from the past.

Kind regards,

Clemens Linders

For 3.5 inch disks you can tell for if it is a 1.44Mb disk or not by the tell tale hole on the side opposite the write protect slider. If it's got the hole it is high capacity, i.e. 1.44Mb, if not it is one of the lower capacities.

See number 1 here - Floppy disk - Wikipedia[^]

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