Haha, good times! I have a few shoeboxes full of floppies. FOr me the biggest joy was getting a copy of Virtual Reality Studio (basicially exactly what it sounds like) and setting it up on DOSBox. I can't thank the devlopers enough for that!
-Jason

I heard 5.25" floppy support was stopped with Windows ME. So that isn't so?

I really doubt it. Where did you read that? 😕

Nah, I've used 5.25" in XP. As long as the BIOS supports it then your good to go.

Not exactly. While Windows XP fully supports 3.5" 1.44MB floppies, all the other formats (3.5" 720k and 5.25") can be read from and written to, but not formatted by the OS. See here

Funny how I never noticed that... The more obvious thing is that XP does not support some functions that older FD imaging software (like Anadisk) used to access the drive. I don't know how many DOS games used non-standard disk format but there were a few. Oddly enough, I was able to use Anadisk from inside of VirtualPC but it was somewhat unstable.
One suggestion from my experience -- make disk images as soon as possible. Even properly stored disks from early 90s are quickly dying now. 5.25" disks are affected much worse that 3.5" -- in my copy of Lost Treasures of Infocom all 3.5" are still perfectly readable and all 5.25" are already dead. Same goes for my copy of Heart of China (actually, two copies on different disks). WinImage is the easiest to use for standard disk formats. I don't know what is the best solution for protected disks, I just never had that problem before (resorted to Anadisk and Teledisk on a few occasions though). I wish we had something like C.A.P.S. project (http://caps-project.org/) for PC.

The post above is mine, did not notice that I was not logged in.

Yes I it had occured to me that some old disks might go bad. But I have a copy of DOS 1.0 and Pascal 1.0 on single sided 5.25 floppies and they both worked the last time I tried them. They are really old 😜 I wonder if DOS 1.0 could boot my current PC 🙄 I don't think I'll try as I have several 486 pc's left over from my Doom network 😲

😒 Opps last post was mine I also forgot to log on 😊

Kippesoep wrote:

Not exactly. While Windows XP fully supports 3.5" 1.44MB floppies, all the other formats (3.5" 720k and 5.25") can be read from and written to, but not formatted by the OS. See here

Nah. I have just formatted a 720KB floppy under WinXP SP2 using NTVDM command-line. It's format GUI that sucks.

Well I am well known among my friends as a late, late, kate adopter of technology and they always point and laugh and say things like "M$ doesn't even SUPPORT that anymore" and I take it as the truth.
Then again they said the dodo was alive and well and a Yeti is in the backyard so they might be pulling my leg...

😒 Dug a 486 out of the parts closet 😵 alas the hard drive seems to have given up the ghost 😢 Of course I had to pick the one that looked in the best shape 😊 and it was the one that did not work. I will have to try again or built a frankenstien out of the parts of the dead 😳 I guess I could just take the 5.25" drive out and put it in an old Pentium since I just wanted to get some games off the old 5.25 disks 😁 Got a bunch of new parts coming in so I may not get around to it till next week 😜

😒 Well I was unable to get the first one I picked to work Conner hard drive? Now where did I get that from ? It says Compaq on it?

The second one I tried works only Dos on it but that will work to copy some 5.25 disks to 3.5 format 😁 The old games on it still work too but I like DOSBox better for the most part 😎

CAPS is no longer for Amiga. Check out www.softpres.org

hard drive seems to have given up the ghost

Now I know where you hail from 😀

Couldn't you install DOS 6 in Dosbox and format from there? 😈

Couldn't you install DOS 6 in Dosbox and format from there?

you can, but at first the question was wether Windows still support 5.25" floppies. Dosbox doesn't have direct access to the hardware, so if the host operating system doesn't support it, then dosbox can't either...