If the drive (vs. the floppy) itself remains an issue in the 486, devices like these [0] are becoming popular. Just plugin some old USB flash drive with the image file and you're good to go.
Gotek Floppy Drive Emulator [0] http://a.co/48x3vtl On Sun, Jan 1, 2017 at 6:52 PM, dmccunney <dennis.mccun...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sun, Jan 1, 2017 at 8:56 PM, Thomas Mueller <mueller6...@twc.com> wrote: >>> That brings back memories. Back in the day, there was discussion of >>> which *brand* of floppies to use, if you wanted to write something to >>> floppy, put it on a shelf, and be able to read it again 5 years from >>> now. At the time, the "gold standard" was Dysan. Floppy disk media >>> varied in quality, and if you bought based on lowest price, you >>> deserved what you got. >> >>> Floppies are sill made and sold - see http://www.floppydisk.com/. I'd >>> get new ones to try this on instead of trying to reuse ancient stuff >>> lying around. >> >> I went to that website, mainly for curiosity. >> >> Now I don't know how or if the USB floppy drives work, whether some modern >> OSes are temperamental in that regard. > > I have one here. It works on my machines, and is seen as A: under > Windows and /dev/fd0 under Linux (IIRC - not in Linux at the moment.) > The other modern OS that might be in use is OS/X, but I'm pretty sure > USB floppy drives work there too. > > For more obscure stuff, you try it, and if it breaks, you get to keep > the pieces. > >> For the internal drives, modern motherboards, as far as I can tell, no >> longer have floppy headers, making it impossible to connect a regular floppy >> drive. > > Which is why you use a USB floppy drive if you need to read floppies. > >> The modern "floppy" is a USB stick. > > Yep. When I installed Linux to dual boot on my desktop, I did so from > a bootable USB stick with the Ubuntu installer on it. > > That worked because my machine could be set to boot from a USB stick. > I have FreeDOS installed on an ancient (2005) Notebook. It has a USB > 2.0 add-on card and can read USB sticks, but cannot *boot* from them. > If I were trying to install DOS as the OS on the HD in that machine, > I'd have to boot from a DOS floppy in the USB floppy drive. *That* > will work. > >> There are also external USB hard drives, and Micronet Fantom (micronet.com) >> external hard drives with both USB 3 and eSATA, up to 8 TB, if my memory is >> accurate. > > Sounds about right. > >> But FreeDOS, and I believe all other DOSes, have trouble with multi-TB hard >> drives, and I would want to partition with GPT, meaning not compatible with >> FreeDOS or ReactOS. > > Yes, they likely will have problems. > > DOS understood FAT16 as the file system. The smallest area of disk > readable/writable under DOS is the cluster, and every cluster must have > a unique address. FAT16 used a 16 bit address, so you had a maximum > of 65,536 clusters. The format routine maxed out at 32K cluster sizes, > so you got a 2GB limit on volume size for early HDs. Hard drives got much > larger, and creating multiple 2GB partitions to stay within DOS's FAT16 limits > got irksome, so MS created FAT32. But by that point, Windows was taking > over. Getting plain DOS to work on a FAT32 file system on larger drives can > be a challenge. (I believe current FreeDOS kernels have FAT32 support.) > > My old notebook was set to multiboot, with Win2K Pro, a couple of > flavors of Linux, and FreeDOS on separate HD partitions. IIRC, I > formatted the FreeDOS partition FAT32. But getting FreeDOS to *boot* > from a grub2 menu was a challenge, and I had to do a lot of fiddling > before it worked. I never did figure out just which fiddle did the > trick. Then an unrelated problem forced me to wipe and reinstall 2K > and redo multi-boot under grub2. I got Windows and Linux booting > again, but never could get FreeDOS back. > > I haven't even booted the machine in a year or more. > >> My computer hardware no longer has any floppy capability. > > Nor most of mine, but that's why a USB floppy drive is a useful accessory. > >> Tom > ______ > Dennis > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most > engaging tech sites, SlashDot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, SlashDot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
