Oof! Hard to say! Back then Windows 3.x was using MS-DOS for such things, I guess!
True floppy emulation might involve DMA emulation and VXDs, maybe.
It's more in Windows 95/98 era, I think. When virtual CD-ROM drives got common and VXDs would emulated Sound Blaster cards for DOS compatibility and so on.
That being said, it's not impossible that there's something for Windows 3.1 and 95.
Maybe an early virtual floppy for Windows 95 will work on Windows 3.1, too?
The *.386 files are VXDs.

Turn off 32 bit file access (386 enhanced settings)?

Jo22 wrote on 2025-10-31, 16:26:

Oof! Hard to say! Back then Windows 3.x was using MS-DOS for such things, I guess! True floppy emulation might involve DMA emula […]
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Oof! Hard to say! Back then Windows 3.x was using MS-DOS for such things, I guess!
True floppy emulation might involve DMA emulation and VXDs, maybe.
It's more in Windows 95/98 era, I think. When virtual CD-ROM drives got common and VXDs would emulated Sound Blaster cards for DOS compatibility and so on.
That being said, it's not impossible that there's something for Windows 3.1 and 95.
Maybe an early virtual floppy for Windows 95 will work on Windows 3.1, too?
The *.386 files are VXDs.

Yeah sadly not luck yet, an early one for Windows 95 probably wouldn't work being 32-bit (unless 32s works!).

Ringding wrote on 2025-10-31, 20:29:

Turn off 32 bit file access (386 enhanced settings)?

Don't have that option in my 3.1.

Try to run Windows in standard mode. Win /s.

Cyberdyne wrote on 2025-11-05, 23:27:

Try to run Windows in standard mode. Win /s.

I'm guessing you mean after mounting it in DOS. Just tried and no, not any different.

I'm using the workaround of using the software WinImage to open and extract every IMG to the hard disk and launch from there. (If there are multiple floppies, every IMG itself should be extracted to a folder called DISK01, DISK02...).

AM_PM wrote on 2025-10-30, 01:11:

Sadly, the mounting is only effective in DOS itself and does not carry on when launching Windows.

What does that mean - File Manager doesn't even show that the drive letter exists for example? I'm surprised, as I thought that Windows 3.x should just show whatever DOS does in terms of the filesystem.

I just tried SHSUFDRV from http://adoxa.altervista.org/shsufdrv/index.html (it's also included in FreeDOS) and it seems to work fine with Windows 3.0 (I mounted the disk before starting Windows, wouldn't expect it to work from within Windows). My mounted 1.44MB floppy image - which became F: - even showed a floppy drive icon in File Manager! I didn't test it that well, but I did double-click on an EXE file from the mounted image and it ran okay. The author even says it's meant to work with Windows 3.x in README.TXT:

SHSUFDRV will not work with Win9X; Win3 is fine.

It says elsewhere that it "works directly with image files" and that "SHSUFDRV will leave the file open, so it should not be moved whilst it is active." which is probably why it doesn't work with Windows 95.

The package also includes SHSURDRV which I think can act as a regular RAM disk or copy a disk image into memory and act as a virtual floppy drive, but I didn't try it. README.TXT also says this:

RAM drives greater than 64MiB will not be accessible after starting Win-
dows (Win9X denies access; Win3 just stuffs up).

I guess that so long as the floppy is less than 64 MiB it should be fine then?