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Floppy disk drives

There is a guy I work with who like playing with making bootable flash drives and Cds. He was talking about working on a DOS project a few days ago. I'll talk to him today to see if he can make me something with serial support using the instructions offered by modem7 on his page. That should get things moving.

Also, as I stated in my other thread, my best friend, who is a computer technician is coming over today to clean the floppy drives in my 5150 and lubricate the rails with grphite to help smooth things out too. Thanks to these threds, I have enough information to get things set up and ready for my to buy some parts. I missed out on my bid for the zip drive last night. E-Bay SAID they accepted my bid, but the item still sold to the previous one for only $5.00. I guess I was too close to the end and missed it due to time lag.
 
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RetroHacker_ said:
No. I run Linux.

But, even if you're running Windows 7, you can *boot off other media* into another OS. You can run Linux from a CD, or even Windows XP. You can boot DOS from floppy or CD. I've seen Windows 98 run from a Zip disk - it probably wouldn't be beyond the realm of possibility to have it running from a flash drive.

-Ian
Click to expand...

I have Dos 6.22 and Windows 3.1 bootable off a CD, I know 95/98 wouldn't be happy off a CD where it cant write to, but it could probably be do-able on a modern machine if you used a large ramdisk. Win XP is fully do-able off CD, just check out BartPE "Win XPE" plugin.

I dont see any reason why 9x couldn't run off a USB flash/hard drive though (as long as you can mask it as a "fixed" and not "removable" disk), Win9x and up I am pretty sure check to be sure you aren't installing on "removable" media.
 
I have a DOS 6.22 bootable CD and and I cannot think of a reason why you could not do this from a thumbdrive assuming your machine will boot from a USB device.

I tried running Norton Commander from inside a VM and using it to connect to older machines, I never got it to work right. I also tried the DOSBox way as well and also fell short, but I may re-try it again at some point.
 
Just to add to the "XP won't work with many of the older floppy formats", I found out XP wouldn't format 2.88 3.5in floppies. I managed to solve this by using WinImage. Perhaps this tip could be of some use for anyone reading this?
 
Tetrium2 said:
Just to add to the "XP won't work with many of the older floppy formats", I found out XP wouldn't format 2.88 3.5in floppies. I managed to solve this by using WinImage. Perhaps this tip could be of some use for anyone reading this?
Click to expand...
Yeah, Winimage is great, it will write/format almost any floppy format your drives are capable of from any version of windows.
 
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