bizzybody Posted April 18, 2009 Posted April 18, 2009 My Compaq Armada 7380DMT can create a set of restore floppies, great, but I don't happen to have that many floppies on hand and 'sides that, floppies have that disturbing tendency to make their data go *poof* even under ideal storage conditions.What I'd like is a virtual floppy drive that the disk creation program can write to, then save disk images which I can burn to a CD-R. It'll have to support Microsoft's DMF format because the OSR2 CAB files are that big. (1.6M vs 2.0M for original Win95 CD version.)I fished this lappy out of a trash can, bought a 20x MultiBay CD-ROM and a power supply for about $5 each off eBay (paid more than 2x that each for shipping) and just fired it up today. There was a floppy drive in the MultiBay, so I *can* make real disks, but they're just so inconvenient. Battery won't charge but they're plentiful on eBay.It has no USB, but does have CardBus and a 1024x768 TFT LCD- even cooler it's *white*. Nobody makes a *white* PC lappy these days! The keyboard and surround of my Vista laptop are sorta greyish-white but the rest of it's all black.The ultimate use for this old Compaq is to be an OBD II automotive diagnostics system.
Ponch Posted April 24, 2009 Posted April 24, 2009 then save disk images which I can burn to a CD-R.I don't know of any equivalent to VFD that runs under Win9x. But something is not clear. Why not directly save the application or files that make the 6 floppies instead of making (virtual) floppies and then remake images and save them images ? Is it simply not possible ? Or do you have a different strategy for using them images if/when needed ?There are a lot of floppy imaging programs. Some let you create exe's that write a floppy, like this one .Some tiny like this one.
jaclaz Posted April 24, 2009 Posted April 24, 2009 (edited) The DMF and "1.68" floppy format was one of the really pesky ones. Winimage can handle both:(through wayback machine as "real page" is giving problems to me right now):http://web.archive.org/web/20080111111608/...lp/wini1a1y.htmA suitable app to format them properly is DCOPY:http://users.telenet.be/jbosman/applications.htmlThere is a "vfloppy" floating around:http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=7281http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=10878which I seem to remember was loosely connected with the app you can find here:ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_...s/pq/utilities/ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_...vfd_folders.exeWhich is actually a virtual floppy disk driver for 9x. Please understand that the above has NO docs/instructions and it's licensing status is UNKNOWN. (your mileage may vary :whistling:)Cannot say if it is compatible with DMF format. jaclaz Edited April 24, 2009 by jaclaz
reboot12 Posted January 14 Posted January 14 (edited) @jaclaz How use vfd_folders ? C:\vfd\VFDSETUP>vfile -fdisk01.img PowerQuest Virtual File System Console Utility. Build vfile50.056 on Jul 06, 2001 01:51:50 Copyright 2001, all rights reserved. disk01.img Mounted as Volume \\.\Vf0 VFile> Edited January 14 by reboot12
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