Virtual Floppy

[grayFalcon]

Does anybody know where to get a program that can mount a virtual floppy, something like DaemonTools, but for floppies? Not read-only though, but with the functionality to write to the virtual floppy too?
Since computers without built-in fdds are coming onto the market, and somebody wahts me to install a software on a few of his computers that insists on having an fdd, I'd really need something like that.

Thanks a lot in advance

[NGNI Cafe]

Never ocurred to me, but I think FDDs in general will soon be placed next to the T-REX dinosaurs in the museums...

But it would surely be a nice thingy to have!

[Tronic]

Haven't had any FDDs (except for my laptops, because HP insists to include one) around here for years now.

This causes trouble when:
-I want to update BIOS or something and the manufacturer only gives me some crappy floppy writer program.
-I need to use IBM (well, Hitachi now) DFT, FT or other utils (shipped with floppy writer too, but also give the option to download pure floppy image "Linux version" (still uses IBM's PC-DOS as environment, but the pure image can be written in Linux, the floppy writer doesn't work there)).

These images aren't a big problem. There are several options:
-Burn a bootable CD that uses the floppy emulation of BIOS.
-Mount the image with mount floppy.img -o /mnt/floppy and copy off the files you need (ibmdft.exe, etc)
then execute 'em under MS-DOS 7.1 (you do have a multi-boot that allows booting into DOS/W9x instead of the usual W2k, don't you?)
-Use WinISO or some other image reading software that can handle floppy images to do the same you did on Linux in the previous step.

But the image writers cause real trouble. You can't use any external app to read their images, nor can you write the image anywhere with it (the program just bombs when it finds out that you don't have floppy drive). I once (on W98) used some ram drive software to get around that. It would let me emulate floppy seamlessly. Unfortunately I can't recall the name of that program anyway, and it was pretty limited $hareware anyway.

Btw, has anyone else noticed how these "legacy-free PCs", while scrapping the extremely useful and perfectly working PS/2 connectors, the widely used serial ports (for IR-control, configuring network hardware, etc) and the still somewhat useful parallel port, DO ALWAYS HAVE A FLOPPY DISK CONTROLLER and in 95 % of cases even have the fucking drive. I think this is just hilarious.

[LocutusofBorg]

Have a look here:

http://www.daemon-tools.cc/dtcc/portal/viewtopic.php?t=1023

and scroll down to the end of the Thread!

[smartsaga]

There is a virtual floppy

I fount it a while a go. It can mount floppy images in read/write mode.

http://members.at.infoseek.co.jp/chitchat/vmware/vfd.html#top

To make comaptible floppy image files I use:

flopimager (freeware - hard to find)
diskImg
DiskCopy

To recover, format and image floppies I use HD-COPY (free DOS program)

Hope that helps