Sorry for posting without having experience with this kind of hardware, just wanted to give my feedback.

I use Winimage to create images of the floppies I want to keep, and when needed again I'll write the images back on some other (formatted without error) floppies.
The images I store on my harddrive and (obviously) won't go bad.

I do it this way as I don't have the kind of money to buy solutions like that.

That said, I'd be interested in reading feedback about your question also 😉

my usb thumb drive shows up as a normal drive and a 1.44mb drive labeled A:
not sure how compatable it is

I second Winimage. Just make images of your floppy disks and put them back on a diskette when you need them. Think of it as an ISO for floppies.

Me too. Instead of the more expensive WinImage, I chose HD-Copy. It is similar to WinImage, but it operates under DOS, and it is freeware.

If you had limited supplies of floppy diskettes (they're hard to find nowadays) and had a lot of bad floppies in your storage, use HDAT. This tool is the opensource version of Disk Regenerator (I'm sure you have ever heard this). This utility cleaned up the bad sectors on your disk drive.

Another way to clean up the bad sectors is to alternate the format. I usually formatted a bad 1.44MB disk as 82-track 1.2MB 5.25" (weird format accessible in HD-Copy), then format it back to 1.44MB. This way the bad sectors are somehow "neutralized" 😁 except if it is physical bad sectors.

Lucky me I found someone disposing 6 boxes of floppy disks, 3 of which are new sealed disks, and only 8 of the remaining 3 boxes which is defective. (One of the new boxes are 5.25" -- even still complete with the "Diamond Coating" (or something like that, I forgot 😁) advertisement of the scratch-free disk 😁

Winimage can be used for free. I just use an older version (4.0 iirc).
It's shareware but practically freeware if used for floppies 😉

Using images should be the way to go yeah, that's what I already do.
It's just annoying as hell that each time I try to write back floppies, half of them are broken. Last time I wanted to run memtest86+ the 4th time I wrote in on floppy it finally worked. To be honest, it puzzles me quite a bit why most of my 3.5" floppies go bad at such a rapid rate by now, while most of my 5.25" (except for the weird QD) discs still work like a charme

I guess MatthewBrian's approach might help to some degree, yet as you/he wrote, it can't fix physically bad sectors.
Thumbdrives would be an option, but require a compatible bios and (what's not always given on my systems) an USB port, therefore that's ruled out.

http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html

those whardware floppy emus are very popular in the amiga world... one can see some amazing things coming, even overlay menu on normal video output (at least on amiga)

have a read here: http://www.amibay.com/showthread.php?t=6051 and here http://www.amibay.com/showthread.php?t=7661

On topic of hardware emulators, I still have yet to see a software OPL3 device driver that reads the appropriate ports virtually... (so any FM midi MCI driver could work with it)

As for floppies I use VGACopy to copy them as it has a much graphical interface for displaying the floppy data that has been copied and you can set the amount of retries before it moves on to the next sector. This is stuff WinImage can't do without you holding down ENTER on the Retry button when an error comes up. 😀

I then use the software Virtual Floppy Drive to mount the disk I want easily by double-click.

On this subject, 2 days ago arrived a floppy emulator i got on eBay. It's this one in particular:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/160981837011?ssPageNa … 984.m1439.l2649

Yeah, chinese made, doesn't seem to be very good and after i bought it a saw a negative review of a Gotek model:

http://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/?p=2599

My Gotek however seems to be more advanced, i tried it yesterday. Documentation is HORRENDOUS written in Engrish but the actual unit is working great. I actually never worked with the software. The unit does have a built in format function. I plugged my 2GB USB stick and before i powered it, i pressed the two buttons all together and after a few seconds the numbers started to go up. It was actually formatting the USB stick in 1000 1.44MB partitions!!!

So i started writing floppies into the actual unit, i just select a number and write a floppy to it. When it's done i just go to the next number and write more and more. I've written about 40 floppies as of now, mostly OSes and Drivers.

So the big question was if it would work well with my retro rigs i'm currently building. Plugged it on, and selected number 001 on the emulator where i wrote MS-DOS 6.22 first disk. I was wondering if it would work as a boot drive. Tried it and it was booting MS-DOS installer!!! So as of now it seems the unit is great so far even though i think that it will only support FAT12 floppies. Anyway, i'll keep my old floppy drive in there but the floppy emulator for me is now the way to go. I actually just ordered two more!

Hi carlostex, very interesting find! What are the computer specs where you have the floppy emulator installed on?

I think the density is what makes the newer disks less reliable. Whenever I turn up a bad 1.44MB disk, I just reformat it as 720KB and it works again. The 720s hardly ever seem to fail, and it's still a usable size for some things.
I got lucky recently and found a 10-pack of HD "Macintosh formatted" floppies at a thrift store. They always seem to price those boxes at 99 cents, but this one still had the 3M factory seal.

carlostex wrote:

On this subject, 2 days ago arrived a floppy emulator i got on eBay. It's this one in particular: […]
Show full quote

On this subject, 2 days ago arrived a floppy emulator i got on eBay. It's this one in particular:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/160981837011?ssPageNa … 984.m1439.l2649

Yeah, chinese made, doesn't seem to be very good and after i bought it a saw a negative review of a Gotek model:

http://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/?p=2599

My Gotek however seems to be more advanced, i tried it yesterday. Documentation is HORRENDOUS written in Engrish but the actual unit is working great. I actually never worked with the software. The unit does have a built in format function. I plugged my 2GB USB stick and before i powered it, i pressed the two buttons all together and after a few seconds the numbers started to go up. It was actually formatting the USB stick in 1000 1.44MB partitions!!!

So i started writing floppies into the actual unit, i just select a number and write a floppy to it. When it's done i just go to the next number and write more and more. I've written about 40 floppies as of now, mostly OSes and Drivers.

So the big question was if it would work well with my retro rigs i'm currently building. Plugged it on, and selected number 001 on the emulator where i wrote MS-DOS 6.22 first disk. I was wondering if it would work as a boot drive. Tried it and it was booting MS-DOS installer!!! So as of now it seems the unit is great so far even though i think that it will only support FAT12 floppies. Anyway, i'll keep my old floppy drive in there but the floppy emulator for me is now the way to go. I actually just ordered two more!

Now all the Chinese need to do is make a version for personal system/2s, heh 😉
Pretty cool though, definitely worth the investment, especially if you're a stupid jackass like me and inadvertently had a lot of moisture in your room around your diskettes. I don't think the excess moisture affected any of my diskettes, but it still isn't good...

@pingaloka
Computer specs range from my 386 through all my systems until it reaches my main Windows 7 rig. As long as you have a BIOS that supports 1.44M floppy drives and 34pin floppy connection i don't think this particular model i got will have any trouble.

Now i don't know about older models though, it seems this model i got is probably one of their latest. As you can see in my other post the reviewed model in that link is slightly different from mine. That model in the review was slammed in pretty much every category.

My experience as of now has been good. The Sound Blaster Pro installer complained that it was not recognizing the installation disks. I noticed that when i formatted the USB stick to 1000 partitions it labeled every single partition with FDISKxxx. So from partition 001 to 999 it uses a FDISK label with the added partion number, example if you select floppy 035 on emulator LCD display, the emulated floppy had a FDISK035 label. So for Sound Blaster Pro installation disks i actually had to re-label the emulated floppies to their original floppies counterpart. When i re-labeled install disk nº1 as SBPRO_DISK1 and disk nº2 as SBPRO_DISK2 the installation now recognized the disks properly and installation went on without problems.

It probably does have its drawbacks, but as of now it seems the most affordable way of replacing or partially replacing actual floppy drives. I'm still gonna keep a real floppy drive as B: just in case.

BTW, i was able to format emulated floppies in DOS without a problem.

Drawbacks as of now that i noticed:

- If you need a non standard floppy format (other than FAT12 filesystem) you need to use a separate USB stick and it only supports one emulated floppy per stick. Multiple floppies per USB stick only work in FAT12. This is probably a limitation of the emulator design.

- It seems it only works with 1.44M floppies. When i tried to write 720K floppies with WinImage to the emulator it didn't recognized floppy as valid. So in WinImage i changed the image format from 720K to 1.44M, pressed write again and it worked. So this limitation is easy to work around.

This is definitely the way things will go in the future. Fact is floppies are getting rarer and I really like the idea of this.

Trouble with sector imagers like Winimage is that they don't capture the entire physical state of the floppy. This will cause many games with disk-based copy protection to fail. If you're serious about archiving your floppies, you need a KryoFlux.

carlostex wrote:

@pingaloka Computer specs range from my 386 through all my systems until it reaches my main Windows 7 rig. As long as you have a […]
Show full quote

@pingaloka
Computer specs range from my 386 through all my systems until it reaches my main Windows 7 rig. As long as you have a BIOS that supports 1.44M floppy drives and 34pin floppy connection i don't think this particular model i got will have any trouble.

Now i don't know about older models though, it seems this model i got is probably one of their latest. As you can see in my other post the reviewed model in that link is slightly different from mine. That model in the review was slammed in pretty much every category.

My experience as of now has been good. The Sound Blaster Pro installer complained that it was not recognizing the installation disks. I noticed that when i formatted the USB stick to 1000 partitions it labeled every single partition with FDISKxxx. So from partition 001 to 999 it uses a FDISK label with the added partion number, example if you select floppy 035 on emulator LCD display, the emulated floppy had a FDISK035 label. So for Sound Blaster Pro installation disks i actually had to re-label the emulated floppies to their original floppies counterpart. When i re-labeled install disk nº1 as SBPRO_DISK1 and disk nº2 as SBPRO_DISK2 the installation now recognized the disks properly and installation went on without problems.

It probably does have its drawbacks, but as of now it seems the most affordable way of replacing or partially replacing actual floppy drives. I'm still gonna keep a real floppy drive as B: just in case.

BTW, i was able to format emulated floppies in DOS without a problem.

Drawbacks as of now that i noticed:

- If you need a non standard floppy format (other than FAT12 filesystem) you need to use a separate USB stick and it only supports one emulated floppy per stick. Multiple floppies per USB stick only work in FAT12. This is probably a limitation of the emulator design.

- It seems it only works with 1.44M floppies. When i tried to write 720K floppies with WinImage to the emulator it didn't recognized floppy as valid. So in WinImage i changed the image format from 720K to 1.44M, pressed write again and it worked. So this limitation is easy to work around.

I think I might get one of those as well. I don't use floppies, but I see it as a very good alternative to install Ms-Dos, Windows 3.1 in the 486 I use, which can only boot from c:\ or a:\

Remember everybody that this is my experience only, some of you may get disappointed if you expect these devices do more. For me these ones i got do enough. They allow me to replace my physical floppies in a way i don't have to be so scared that my old floppies have gone FUBAR and i need to search everywhere on the web for data loss replacement and search stores everywhere for brand new floppies.

One thing for sure, these devices will only get better and better, but this is only as long as the bigger markets require for them, industrial machines mainly, because these manufacturers have simply no interest in developing for such a small and niche market like us retro enthusiasts.