This is also very useful for virtual machines such as VMware or Microsoft Virtual PC.
This free very useful program is called Virtual Floppy Drive 2.1. – website
Here is a quick overview and some screen shots.
Open the program, choose a drive 0 or drive 1.
Click on Open, the browse to where you want to store your floppy disk image.
Once you have the file name and location set, choose “Create”.
There you have it. You now have a virtual floppy drive. You can also set the drive letter with the “Change” button.
If you have any trouble, just stop and start the driver to “reset” things.
To download the software visit.
http://chitchat.at.infoseek.co.jp/vmware/vfd.html
Enjoy!
This program is —— in that I can’t run most auto extract dos programs to a: . I have to make a disk image…because the extracting exe does not detect this virtual —-. pissed.
Well, the tool worked for me. The order that I did things in was :
On Drive tab, chose auto, clicked install and then start.
Switched to Drive 0
created my image, assigned the drive letter A (I had to do this specifically), then formatted, and voila, my Dell BIOS app found the floppy and extracted to the image.
UBER useful tool.
Cheers,
Me.
Yes, it worked for me too, but I can not change the disk (media) when sitting in drive A (command prompt A:>)
We can change for the normal floppy right?
This is a great tool!
I’m using it for batch automation from C# code, and it works like a charm. That is, until Gates & co created Windows 7. WHY?!?!
Anyone who knows how to use this tool (VFD) or any other virtual floppy tool with a command line interface in windows 7?
Hi, I was hoping you could help me on a particular situation I’m having to get through? An honestly, I’ve hit a brick wall several times. So here’s my situation, I’ll try to explain it as clear as I can and again, any help on this would greatly help me. I have a Gateway laptop, MA7 with a DVD drive and no Operating system. I begin to install XP PRO and it says ‘no hard detected’? So it needs the F6 driver add-in during the XP installation process, however the problem is the Gateway MA7 laptop has “NO FLOPPY DRIVE” so I go to the Gateway web-site, they have this driver for this very problem, but it needs to be created on a floppy disc, which I do not have to extract it on to a floppy disc on any of my systems (3) systems total. So do you think there is a way to do this via a USB Flash drive? or do you think I have no choice and have to buy a USB floppy drive? During the F6 option pick of the XP installation, XP asks for the driver and specifically looks for specifically an A: floppy drive. I down loaded the driver file from Gateway and when you initiate it to extract, it too is looking for a floppy drive to write to. I hoping or thinking that maybe I could create a Virtual floppy drive A: on my download system then write them to a USB flash drive, then on the USB flash drive, create some sort of code via the autoexec.bat & config.sys files that would allow me to boot via the USB port (which the MA7 can do) and basically fool the MA7 laptop into thinking it has a floppy drive so when loading XP it can find the driver files to recognize the hard drive. I guess this is a known problem for the Gateway laptop, that’s why they have the hard drive driver files on their website for down loading to fix this issue. I hope I was pretty clear on what the problems are and I’m hoping you may have a solution to get around this problem. Any help would be a BIG help at this point and again, thank you in advance.
Regards, Kevin in Cleveland, Ohio
Recap:
I need a Virtual floppy drive A: created in XP on an exiting running machine to write driver files to.
I then need to create a virtual floppy drive via a bootable USB flash drive to fool the laptop into thinking it has a floppy drive to read the driver files during the XP F6 installation option.
Again, thanks for your time, Kevin