Virtual Floppy Drive for Win 95?

[bizzybody]

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]

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]

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.htm

A suitable app to format them properly is DCOPY:

http://users.telenet.be/jbosman/applications.html

There is a "vfloppy" floating around:

http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=7281

http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=10878

which 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.exe

Which 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