This new laptop of mine has no floppy drive, and as far as I can tell this is usual for most new machines, especially below 2,000 €uro's 😒

Now I just had to install a program requiring such a drive to complete the setup process 😢
I had the floppy, but no drive.
An external usb fdd costs 60 € as I've been told 😜

The technical support then sent me its contents as an email attachment...
which was canceled as a potential threat (that was a .lic file) 😵

I somehow went around that by copying the floppy files to another pc, then moving them onto a usb pen drive, hence to the laptop hd.
At this point, I tried using the "old"
SUBST a: [my files]
trick and to my surprise it worked !

I say surprise, because I wasn't sure the WinXP cmd.exe could make it.
Besides, actually the SUBST command doesn't create a true virtual floppy drive, it's like an alias for any local folder, isn't it and that's why I didn't expect it to help that much.

I wanted to share this since someone else might also be in trouble with the missing fdd issue.

In such cases, does anyone know of other workarounds ?

Another thing I didn't bother to try thereafter, but was planning to if needed, would have been :

create a floppy image via WinImage, load the .ima or .imz file using the (freeware) Virtual Floppy Drive (VFD) for Windows NT tool and hopefully ending up having a working virtual a: drive.
As I said, I didn't need go that far, but I guess that's more like the right way of doing it.

What do you say ?