Cool! Have to get one of those ASAP.

Yea it's such a nifty little gadget 😀

can't say that I like them, they made them too cheap for my taste... if only it was like the HxC device... http://www.lotharek.pl/product.php?pid=42

If they made them like the HxC, they'd be >$100. These look great for light use on the cheap.

Can you boot MS-DOS from this device?

bristlehog wrote:

Can you boot MS-DOS from this device?

Absolutely. It acts like a floppy drive.

Strange. I tried to format the 1.44M image visible in Windows 8 using RUFUS, but get 'Missing operating system' during boot. Do I need special software to write to the USB stick formatted by this device?

The 1000 images are all formatted after holding down the buttons on power on.

Just got to then select what floppy you want and copy over.

Do you have a floppy emulator in your Windows 8 machine?

What I haven't managed to solve yet is finding a way to backup the entire USB. Because a stuffed up system of 1000 images can cause a lot of pain.

On the older versions of those things, the ones that only supported 100 'disks', there was a way to use regular IMG files. There was a bit of voodoo involved, but IIRC it required creating a folder on the root of the flash drive named IMG144, naming the image files in order from 000.img to 099.img and dumping them into that folder, then using some sort of button combination on the emulator unit to switch it into image mode. I wonder if the newer ones have a similar function...

I don't have a floppy emulator in Windows 8 machine, it's a laptop. When I plug the formatted USB stick into the laptop, it sees one 1.38M flash drive. I can format it with Rufus making a MS-DOS bootable drive, but the 486 won't boot from it, saying 'Missing operating system'. It has Phoenix BIOS if it makes any difference.

My emulator is seemingly newer one, supporting up to 1000 floppies.

I suppose that for backing up the whole 1000 images you should use some raw copying routines to make a bit-by-bit image of your USB stick. Unix 'dd' command would do it for instance. I think it should be something like: sudo dd if=/dev/sdb of=backup.img

Ok I see.

Well the USB is not meant to be used like you are using it 😀

You need another floppy emulator on the computer that reads the USB.

OR you get a standard floppy drive (there are USB types) and then copy that disk on your retro PC from a real floppy to the USB one.

I don't have / use Unix. Would there be a Windows utility to perform a backup of the USB. Like you said it shows up as only a single image to the OS.

But of course. Try this one: http://hddguru.com/software/HDD-Raw-Copy-Tool/

I think I'll investigate the USB stick floppies store structure. Maybe there's a method to operate without the Gotek device itself. It would make things easier for laptop users like me.

I contacted the eBay seller as well but the communication broke down because of language misunderstandings 😀

I will try that tool, thanks!

The way I use mine is I have the drive in my 486 and the software on my WinXP PC.
Everything works fine between the 2 as long as I use the software. Coping direct to the USB with all the folders gives mixed results. Using the software select a disk and that 1.44 disk will show in explorer, copying the files there will work fine.
I also couldn't create a boot disk simply using the sys command but the software has a make disk bootable option, It'll then ask for a .img file to pull the system files off, that worked 1st time.

I doubt you'll ever be able to boot from the USB without a drive though as each disk is hidden away in its own folder so would get missed during the boot process.

What software do you have?

Mine is non-English and confusing.

I don't need to boot without Gotek drive, I just want to write floppy images to my USB stick without one on a modern laptop.

Don't know if it supports Windows 8 but I use 1.23 as its a simple exe and does everything I need
Tried 1.31 very quickly once and it didn't work out for me, but didn't give it much of a chance either

http://www.ipcas.com/support/usb-floppy-emula … n-download.html

bristlehog wrote:

I don't need to boot without Gotek drive, I just want to write floppy images to my USB stick without one on a modern laptop.

Did you have any luck?

I found this article with some information:

http://goughlui.com/?p=3246

Not yet. I tried to low-level analyze the usb stick, but Windows only sees it as a 1.38M drive, so I can't see other contents.

Thanks for the article, it really cleared things up.

Were you successful in backing up your usb stick?