The Shop > Software Tools

Windows 7 and USB Floppy Drive Oddity

(1/1)

awemawson:
I need to be able to read and write floppy disks to talk to my legacy CNC lathe (Denford MIRAC under DOS6.22) featured in another post. This is on a Windows 7  Professional 32 bit machine.

I bought a USB external floppy drive. It works splendidly. I can write to floppies, I can read floppies, BUT Windows Explorer cannot format them, reporting the floppy as write protected (It isn't !)

Now if I open a command prompt window and format them from there - no problem !!

OK so it's not an issue - I have a work around, but I'd love to know WHY Microsoft's left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing :lol:

beeshed:
I have a similar problem with writing to SD cards. Eventually found a fix involving creating an HKEY which worked once but then it went back to objecting again. Yet I can write to the card on my tablet but it doesn't have enough memory to write the now bloated raspi image. One victim on the internet was able to use his phone to format.

Noitoen:
You could replace the drive on the machine with one of these https://www.amazon.com/Floppy-Drive-Emulator-Emulator-Keep-Install/dp/B0083Z29JO and use a regular USB stick.

Jo:

--- Quote from: awemawson on March 11, 2018, 05:51:46 PM ---OK so it's not an issue - I have a work around, but I'd love to know WHY Microsoft's left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing :lol:

--- End quote ---

Maybe they work on the principal that sometimes it is better that your left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing so it doesn't get jealous  :coffee:

Jo

hanermo:
There are multiple possible reasons I know of .. and certainly many more I do not know of.

The windowsX stack has a large nr of different implementations and details on the hard drives and the lan stuff - that I know of.
Thus multiple configs of hard drives do not work "right" on windows if they are modern ssds, small solid state cards, usb-interface cards, etc.

Most of the problems have to do with fairly old 15-years ago circa 1999 decisions regarding removable media, sizes, boot block, etc.

Navigation

[0] Message Index