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Looking for a cheap USB thumb drive that can emulate a Floppy drive

lokiju

lokiju

Lifer
I'm not sure where to get one from but I've heard they're around, I have an old laptop thats BIOS doesn't support booting from external USB CD ROMs that weren't specifically built for the model laptop I have. I read on a forum for that model laptop I have that I can get around this buy having a USB Hard/thumb Drive that can do floppy emulation, but haven't had much luck finding one that's at least 512 MB and not a crazy amount of money.

Anyone know where I can find one, or does anyone have any experience using a USB drive that does floppy emulation?

:beer:

Not sure what forum this belongs to since it's kind of HW, SW & OS related.

 
If the end goal is to access an OS CD-ROM why do you need 512 MB? If you can find one that will allow you to boot you should be able to load CD drivers & go from there.

Viper GTS
 
If the bios doesn't support it, how are you going to convince the bios to look for a floppy on the USB port?
 
Originally posted by: Viper GTS
If the end goal is to access an OS CD-ROM why do you need 512 MB? If you can find one that will allow you to boot you should be able to load CD drivers & go from there.

Viper GTS
Click to expand...

Well I could go with a smaller one and just get it to load up some dos drivers to support a CD rom but thought it'd be nice to boot and load the OS from the thumb drive.

 
Originally posted by: So
If the bios doesn't support it, how are you going to convince the bios to look for a floppy on the USB port?
Click to expand...

Well according to the reading I've done on this model, it'll work if the bios thinks is a usb floppy, but won't support a USB CD Rom or even a regular USB thumb drive without floppy drive emulation.

At what it cost to get a USB floppy drive, I figured I could just buy a thumb drive that can have other uses and be able to do a fresh install on an OS on it.

 
Originally posted by: FelixDeKat
This is what you get for taking religion out of schools and floppy drives out of computers.

Brilliant ideas. :roll:
Click to expand...

I'll keep my floppies in my ancient computers that don't boot from USB and my Religion in my ancient schools that don't separate chute and state. 😛
 
This is what you do. Take that HD out of the laptop, attach it to your desktop via a $5 adapter to convert the latop ide connector into the desktop connector.

At this point, use a win98 boot disk, fdisk the drive with fat32 and format/s to put a basic dos boot on there.

At this point, boot into windows on your desktop with that drive still attached as a slave. copy over the i386 directory of whatever OS you plan to install. Put smartdrv.exe in there too..it will speed up the install by 10x.

Stick the drive back into the laptop and it will boot up directly to the c:\ prompt. Make sure smartdrv is loaded, go to i386 and run winnt32 to start windows install. After it's done installing, convert to NTFS.
 
Originally posted by: d33pt
This is what you do. Take that HD out of the laptop, attach it to your desktop via a $5 adapter to convert the latop ide connector into the desktop connector.

At this point, use a win98 boot disk, fdisk the drive with fat32 and format/s to put a basic dos boot on there.

At this point, boot into windows on your desktop with that drive still attached as a slave. copy over the i386 directory of whatever OS you plan to install. Put smartdrv.exe in there too..it will speed up the install by 10x.

Stick the drive back into the laptop and it will boot up directly to the c:\ prompt. Make sure smartdrv is loaded, go to i386 and run winnt32 to start windows install. After it's done installing, convert to NTFS.
Click to expand...

E-hug.

Thanks, I'll give that a try!

 
There are two things that need to be kept separate: FORMATTING a storage media as a "superfloppy" (which means no partition table), or having a USB stick that pretends to be a USB floppy drive in HARDWARE.

The former can be done to any USB stick by using the appropriate formatting tool, the latter is a (very rare) hardware feature of the USB stick. I have one such stick, which has a 64MB main segment plus a 1.4MB segment that presents itself as a floppy drive to the system.
 
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