Reading Floppy Disk images in Windows 10 (and running the software within!)
Insert a different disk and try again.' Which I have done over and over with all different types of disks, but get same result. I've made sure that the disks are not read only and I've tried two different wire sets from the disk drive to the mother board and as I said earlier 3 seperate floppy disk drives. How to read a Floppy disk If you have old floppy disk laying around, you can actually read them and transfer the files off of them with a simple USB disk rea. Instead of following the message, read this article to recover and read files off your floppy disk. We will guide you with the different ways of formatting disks on Windows and Mac operating systems and how to recover data with the Recoverit data recovery software. I remember in XP there were times where you need a floppy drive to create book disk ( If I am not wrong ). Virtual Floppy Drive is the program which can handle these situations for you by installing a Floppy Disk on your computer and will show along with Other Drives. This is similar to Adding a Virtual CD or DVD drive to your drive.
Introduction
Just recently I upgraded one of my computers from Windows 7 to Windows 10. The upgrade went smoothly except for 1 problem. I often need to run and or/check old MS-DOS software in floppy disk images. In Windows 7 I would use Virtual PC 2007 to do this. Problem was, Windows 10 doesn't support Virtual PC 2007. I tried various workarounds like this one, but they didn't work for me.
I went searching for alternatives. There are certainly virtualisation alternatives around, but many seemed too industrial from my kind of use (e.g. VMWare Workstation, which was only available for 64-bit environments), and/or they didn't support floppy disk images. Finally I found one that did...
Oracle VM VirtualBox
This seems to deliver the goods. It's simple to use, intuitive and has floppy disk image support that handles *.vfd and *.ima formats, both of which I create and use with Winimage.
Figure 1. Choosing a disk image in an MS-DOS machine in VM VirtualBox
MS-DOS seems to be the simplest OS that VM VirtualBox supports and there are no 'Guest additions' or extension packs for it...but at least it provides 3.5 inch floppy disk support which is what I was looking for. Huzzah!
In fact, since I first published this, I've managed to get all these OS packages running in my VirtualBox:
- MS-Dos 6.22
- Windows 3.11
- Windows 95
- Windows 98
- Windows NT SP6
- Windows 2000
- Windows XP SP3
- Windows 7 SP1
A Windows environment for every occasion!
What if I want to just write files to and from a floppy disk image?
There are a few solutions for this. One is Winimage. If you want to have a floppy drive image attached to your modern OS though and have software interact with it, ImDisk is a good choice. It creates a virtual drive and assigns a letter to it. Not only can it read 'PC-type' floppy images but also CD-ROMS and hard drives.
Figure 2. Attaching a disk image in ImDisk
Last word
So, if running intel-based software from floppy disk images in a 32-bit Windows 10 environment is a problem for you, Oracle VM VirtualBox (at least at the time of writing) seems to solve it. If you just want to move files, try Winimage. If you want the OS and programs to interact with your disk image then ImDisk will do the job.
Tez
30th March, 2018
Revised, 27th April, 2018
2nd Revision, 4th December, 2018 (mentioned ImDisk).
From Classicamiga
As some of you know, from the introduction of XP onwards it no longer supports the formatting of floppy disks smaller than 1.4MB. So how do we format a DD floppy disk as a 720KB PC disk to use for transferring files from a PC to an Amiga?
There are two fairly simple solutions. The first is still built into Windows.
Method 1
- Open a new command prompt by going to Start->run and typing CMD
- Insert your blank floppy disk into the drive.
- Type Format A: /T:80 /N:9
- Your floppy disk will be formatted as a 720KB Double Density Floppy Disk ready to be read by an Amiga.
Method 2
- Download the program FMT (see below)
- Extract the FMT.EXE file anywhere on your HD in a location you will remember.
- Open a new command prompt by going to Start_>run and typing CMD
- Navigate to the location of the FMT.EXE file on your HD
- Type FMT A: /f:720
- Your floppy disk will be formatted as a 720KB Double Density Floppy Disk ready to be read by an Amiga.
How To Open Floppy Disk
There are a few solutions for this. One is Winimage. If you want to have a floppy drive image attached to your modern OS though and have software interact with it, ImDisk is a good choice. It creates a virtual drive and assigns a letter to it. Not only can it read 'PC-type' floppy images but also CD-ROMS and hard drives.
Figure 2. Attaching a disk image in ImDisk
Last word
So, if running intel-based software from floppy disk images in a 32-bit Windows 10 environment is a problem for you, Oracle VM VirtualBox (at least at the time of writing) seems to solve it. If you just want to move files, try Winimage. If you want the OS and programs to interact with your disk image then ImDisk will do the job.
Tez
30th March, 2018
Revised, 27th April, 2018
2nd Revision, 4th December, 2018 (mentioned ImDisk).
From Classicamiga
As some of you know, from the introduction of XP onwards it no longer supports the formatting of floppy disks smaller than 1.4MB. So how do we format a DD floppy disk as a 720KB PC disk to use for transferring files from a PC to an Amiga?
There are two fairly simple solutions. The first is still built into Windows.
Method 1
- Open a new command prompt by going to Start->run and typing CMD
- Insert your blank floppy disk into the drive.
- Type Format A: /T:80 /N:9
- Your floppy disk will be formatted as a 720KB Double Density Floppy Disk ready to be read by an Amiga.
Method 2
- Download the program FMT (see below)
- Extract the FMT.EXE file anywhere on your HD in a location you will remember.
- Open a new command prompt by going to Start_>run and typing CMD
- Navigate to the location of the FMT.EXE file on your HD
- Type FMT A: /f:720
- Your floppy disk will be formatted as a 720KB Double Density Floppy Disk ready to be read by an Amiga.
How To Open Floppy Disk
Which method is better? And how do the commands work?
Both of these methods work just as well, so it is up to you which one you use.
If you look at the command for the Windows Format command, from XP you now need to specify the number of tracks and number of sectors to format a 720KB disk. Before XP you used to be able to type Format A: /f:720 just as you do for the FMT command. But that now no longer works so you need to specify the tracks and sectors.
The FMT program has some interesting options beyond just formatting a 720KB disk. If you also need to format other sizes it supports many different ones from 360KB up to 1.68KB.
Reading PC formatted Floppy Disks in an Amiga
To read a 720KB PC formatted floppy disk in an Amiga you must have a version of CrossDOS installed on your Amiga. This is built into all versions of Workbench since version 2.1. If you have an older version of Workbench then you will need to try and get hold of the standalone version of CrossDOS and install it into your copy of Workbench. The standalone version of CrossDos should work with Workbench 1.3 and above.
With WB2.1+ you first need to mount the PC0: device driver by typing mount PC0: into an Amiga shell, or by moving the PC0: device from the Storage/DOSDrivers folder into the Devs/DVSDrivers folder. If you move the device then Workbench should be able to read PC formatted disks all of the time without the need to manually mount the device each time.
Once the PC0: device is mounted you can insert the PC formatted floppy and the Amiga will be able to read and write to it just as it would an Amiga formatted disk.
Discussion Forum
Discuss this article in the classicamiga forum thread Formatting 720KB Floppy under XP/Vista.
How To Read Floppy Disk With Vista Os
Downloads
- FMT file download - You need to be registered on the forum to download the file.
Reference
- Classicamiga Forum (2008) - Formatting 720KB Floppy under XP/Vista - Written by Harrison; Forum.