gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials » emulate floppy http://www.ghacks.net A technology news blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Fri, 10 Feb 2012 20:51:26 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Virtual Floppy Driveshttp://www.ghacks.net/2009/01/20/virtual-floppy-drives/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/01/20/virtual-floppy-drives/#comments Tue, 20 Jan 2009 16:19:49 +0000 Martin Brinkmann http://www.ghacks.net/?p=10023 Modern computers do not come with floppy drives anymore which can turn out to be problematic if a software requires a floppy drive. This is usually software that has been written when floppy drives were more common and installed on every computer. Some older operating systems or software programs require a floppy drive for some of their functions.

Virtual floppy drives provide floppy drive functionality in Windows without the need to have a real floppy drive installed. They can be used to mount floppy drive images or use functions in software programs that want to write data to floppy drives.

Virtual Floppy Drive is probably one of the most popular tools to emulate a floppy drive. It is a portable software that is compatible with Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP (Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003 are supposed to work as well). The user can access both the command line or graphical user interface version of the program as both are provided.

virtual floppy drives

It is possible to emulate one or two floppy drives support a wide variety of different media types from 160KB (5.25″) to 2.88MB (3.5″). The software supports file and RAM modes, persistent drive letters and integrates itself nicely into the Windows shell.

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/01/20/virtual-floppy-drives/feed/ 15 Copy and run Floppy Boot Disks from USBhttp://www.ghacks.net/2006/09/06/copy-and-run-floppy-boot-disks-from-usb/ http://www.ghacks.net/2006/09/06/copy-and-run-floppy-boot-disks-from-usb/#comments Wed, 06 Sep 2006 09:30:56 +0000 Martin Brinkmann http://www.ghacks.net/2006/09/06/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.

Update: The website and download is no longer available. Alternatives are available here.

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