Copy and run Floppy Boot Disks from USB

Ghacks got slashdotted yesterday and I had to enable caching to make the site run fluent as usual. I’m sorry if you experienced troubles connecting to my website, those should be solved by now. When I was installing Windows XP on my new computer that had only SATA drives I had to use a floppy disk to load the SATA drivers because Windows did not have them onboard at that time. I had to buy a floppy drive, floppy disks and create a bootdisk and load the drivers from that disk during setup.

I’am now going to introduce two freewares that emulate floppy drives and are able to copy and run the bootdisk from USB. The first freeware is called Bootdisk to Bootstick, it makes it possible to copy the contents of a floppy disk or virtual floppy image to an USB stick. The USB stick remains bootable just like the floppy disk would be. This is great if you do not have a floppy drive anymore but need to boot from floppy because your manufacturer is offering the tool / driver only as a bootable floppy disk.

Virtual Floppy drive is used to emulate a floppy drive making it possible to create bootable floppy disks without having a floppy drive connected to your computer. I still remember the old days when a program would only create a bootdisk if a floppy drive was present. If you did not have a floppy drive or disk inside it would not create the much needed bootdisk. This belongs to the past now.