5.25" drive and modern Windows \ VOGONS

5.25" drive and modern Windows

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First post, by Errius

Posted on 2017-05-11, 12:25

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Is it possible to use an old 360 KB 5.25" drive in a newish system running Windows 7? BIOS support is there but what will Windows make of it? I know it won't format old disks but can it read and write to them?

What about Windows 8 and 10?

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Reply 1 of 5, by Roman78

Posted on 2017-05-12, 04:26

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Even on WinXP it is not possible to format 5,25" disks.

But you have a 34pin Disk connector on your mainboard? On mine it is missing.

Reply 2 of 5, by sd_entertainmnt

Posted on 2017-05-14, 06:54

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Roman78 wrote:
Even on WinXP it is not possible to format 5,25" disks.

But you have a 34pin Disk connector on your mainboard? On mine it is missing.

I had no problem formatting 1.2mb 5.25 floppy on Windows XP. I doubt windows 7 would be any different.

Reply 3 of 5, by Koltoroc

Posted on 2017-05-14, 13:56

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AFAIK Windows 8 is the last version that still has support for internal floppy drives (34 pin connector). From what I read Windows 10 dropped support for those, but then find me a modern board that still has a floppy controller (industrial hardware does not count). However USB floppy drives still work at least.

Reply 4 of 5, by derSammler

Posted on 2017-05-14, 14:20

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Koltoroc wrote:
However USB floppy drives still work at least.

But these are all 3.5" only.

Haven't tried myself, but there's a low-level driver called "fdrawcmd.sys" which should re-add full floppy support to Windows up to 8.

Reply 5 of 5, by Jo22

Posted on 2017-05-14, 15:41

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Windows 10 dropped support for native floppy drives. But there's a workaround, I heard. It involves copying files from Windows 7.

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