Don’t Copy That Floppy?
A digital friend who goes by the handle “alpha” uncovered a relatively obscure, but potentially useful, utility for Windows folks with software that’s stuck in the ’90s:
I don’t know about you, but in this day and age I hate it when a driver or a program demands to use your floppy drive in order to unpack itself or for a specific purpose during installation (SATA driver writers, I’m looking at you!) and all you want to do is get your grubby mitts on the files.
Pretty much none of my systems have a floppy drive on them – haven’t since the late 90’s – and while I have a USB floppy drive as a last resort, the physical disks themselves are pretty rare now adays.. so what are you to do when you need those driver files and the damn unpacker is demanding a floppy drive with no other option?
Up to the plate steps Virtual Floppy Drive, which allows you to mount a virtual floppy drive that you can create an image file to use or you can actually mount old floppy images to read straight off your HDD. This is similar to tool like daemon tools, but nowhere near as polished… but it gets the job done. :)
Uh… I still hate floppies, but I still love Floppy.
3 Comments
How to Start Your Own Blog
October 28th, 2007
at 9:22pm
ol days of Commander Keen and The Oregon Trail. Virtual Floppy Drive works on most 32 bit Windows systems, and supports a variety of floppy disk formats from both the 5.25″ and 3.5″ eras. Link viaChris Pirillo. Photo by steffenz.
Gary Shell
October 10th, 2007
at 5:41pm
Anyone tried this out under Vista yet???
Gary
Stan
January 15th, 2009
at 9:32pm
Floppy drives are cheap, usually about $12 give or take 2 bucks. They mount easily, and use virtually no computer resources. Why not put one in? I rarely need it, but the few times I do I’m glad it’s there.
Any box I build gets a 3½” drive. I have old floppies that sometimes (rarely) I need.
What I’ve really given up on are the >really old< bigger floppies. I have 5¼” floppies that may never see the inside of a drive again. I also have a few 8″ floppies that I keep for posterity’s sake.