ANYBODY HERE USE A USB FLOPPY? ANY LUCK?

[+wood_jl]

After not worrying about it for years, I suddenly realized NONE of my computers have floppy drives!!

 

(1) Picked up a cheap ancient Win98 machine - not ethernet, CD, or wireless. Just floppy. Wanted to copy some drivers to it. Hell, even if I get a ethernet card I can't get the drivers to it unless I buy floppy to copy to from my online machine with optical drive.

 

(2) Would like to try writing some ST discs from images. Hope it'll work for that

 

 

eBay Auction -- Item Number: 220577207970

 

This is the cheapest ($9 shipped) for a Yankee, and it's located in U.S. Comparable offers from China but I'm leary.

 

USB floppy seems strange and hokey to me - should I just get one or should I look for a particular brand or something?

 

Thanks!

Edited March 31, 2010 by wood_jl

[godslabrat]

Get one, use it, spend as little as possible on it. Chances are, once you transport all the stuff you want off the old computer, you'll never need the floppy drive again.

[jaybird3rd]

I have a Sony USB floppy drive that I've used a couple of times. I think they're really intended for pulling data files off of floppies, in case you have a new computer that didn't come with a built-in floppy drive. I can't imagine that they're useful for emergency boot disks or the other very rare cases where you'd need a floppy drive.

[Rybags]

I doubt a USB floppy drive will work during the XP install process (where it prompts you for driver floppies if you need them).

 

For general transfers without network, a USB thumbdrive is by far the easiest option.

 

Other options are to just get an IDE convertor which allows plugging the 2.5 drives onto the end of a standard IDE cable + power molex connector. Then connect your laptop drive to the big PC and transfer everything in one hit.

 

But of course, if you want to do your ST transfers, you've warranted the purchase right there.

Edited March 31, 2010 by Rybags

[+Mitch]

I doubt a USB floppy drive will work during the XP install process (where it prompts you for driver floppies if you need them).

 

For general transfers without network, a USB thumbdrive is by far the easiest option.

 

Actually it works just fine for adding storage drivers in the XP boot process. I've done it many times.

 

To use a USB thumbdrive on Win98 you need to load the driver.

 

Mitch

[Seob]

Ehm, you talked about a win98 pc. Then i don't know if a usb floppydrive will work without installing a driver. I used a win98 pc for work until 2 years ago, and with every usb-stick i inserted i had to install drivers. And i didn't always had access to the drivers, since newer usb-stick didn't have any driver for win 98.

So i don't know if you can use a usb floppy without installing driver for it on win 98. I guess buying a new or second hand internal floppy drive is easier, because you don't have to worry about drives or so.

[TrekMD]

I have a USB floppy and, though I hardly ever use it, it does work just fine.

[nathanallan]

I use a USB fdd on a winxp machine and am able to transfer okay with one exception: The disk has to be formatted in the 98 machine first. Otherwise it gives me an unreadable disk if I format it in the USB drive.

 

I'll send you 2 or three standard fdd's for $9, whatever I can ship for that price, cables too.

 

Right now I'm a bit over-happy about floppy drives, somebody game me a card edge connector cable for 5.25" drives, gotta love 'em.

[CGQuarterly]

I have one, and use it all the time. I use it to transfer data from my modern laptop (which is my primary PC) to my DOS machine when it isn't enough stuff to make it worth burning a CD.

 

Chris

[+wood_jl]

I was going to try to write some ST disc images to floppy. So I look in one of the threads here:

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/157296-how-to-get-st-images-onto-real-st-disk/

 

and it points to this page:

 

http://ppera.07x.net/atari/floimgd.php

 

Which has some low-level drivers for built-in floppy NOT USB FLOPPY.

 

See, although I had not seen this info, I figured I'd run into some hokey shit with USB floppy. <sigh>

[+wood_jl]

Does it matter what brand of 1.44 "REAL" floppy I get? I remember I used to really want TEAC brand back in the day. Are they still around?

 

I've never even looked to see if my P.O.S. Compaq even has a floppy drive header pin hookup-thingy.

 

Since I moved to using Laptops mostly, I haven't used that machine in a while.

 

I'm starting to think that Laptops suck. No serial port, no floppy drive, etc etc.

 

MORE IMPORTANT THAN BRAND, WHICH KIND WILL WORK WITH PC SOFTWARE WRITING 82-83 TRACK ST FLOPPIES?

Edited April 11, 2010 by wood_jl

[Herbarius]

Does it matter what brand of 1.44 "REAL" floppy I get?

I might be mistaken, but as far as I recall they all were Mitsumi anyway (those that weren't by the actual company Mitsumi were 100% compatible to their models).