Changing floppy drive types in windows 7 \ VOGONS

Changing floppy drive types in windows 7

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First post, by nzoomed

Posted on 2017-10-30, 00:17

nzoomed Offline

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Im trying to use omniflop on my ASUS P5Q Deluxe motherboard running windows 7.

My BIOS setup does not allow me to select a 5.25 drive, only a 720K or 1.44MB 3.5 inch drive.

The instructions for installing omniflop say it does not matter if you cant set the drive type in the bios, however it will still only treat this drive as a 3.5 inch drive in omniflop.

Is there any way in the registry to change the type of floppy drive in windows, so you can override the type of drive that the BIOS tells windows is there?

I also see this thread here with a program that can configure a second floppy drive.
http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?300 … 8648#post218648

I tried this, and i cant get two drives to work properly, so im instead connecting the 5.25 drive to the first position on the cable.

I just wished there was a program that could write to the CMOS the type of drive that is installed and I would be OK. 😀

TIA

Reply 1 of 4, by Mister Xiado

Posted on 2017-10-31, 05:41

Mister Xiado Offline

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Mine allows me to select either, but I cannot have both on one cable. At the moment, I have my 5.25" drive as A, and a USB floppy as B, and it drives me up the ████ing wall when I run a bootdisk program and it won't let me specify which drive is the 1.44MB drive. Eh. For the record, my board is a Gigabyte 965P-DS3 running the final hacky firmware revision for it, that lets it work with a Core 2 Quad Q8200.

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Reply 2 of 4, by nzoomed

Posted on 2017-10-31, 10:25

nzoomed Offline

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Im sure the older bios revision allowed more drive options to select, but anyway I have made some success but its still not 100% working right.
I did this CMOS hack here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9YXyfG0Vf0
I was able to get windows to see the drive as a 5.25 drive, but it would not properly handle 360K floppies and was giving some other unusual problems.

Omniflop did work but with some errors.

IDK if windows 7 is up to the task much or not.

Would be awesome if there was some way to use floppy drives on a modern computer.
I wonder how hard it would be to design something using a microcontroller and/or FGPA to connect a floppy drive over USB.

Reply 3 of 4, by Mister Xiado

Posted on 2017-11-01, 21:09

Mister Xiado Offline

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Mine is set to 1.2MB, but until I get a few more of my old systems up and running, I can't be sure of the format or fitness of most of my 5.25" disks. There exists floppy adapters that connect to 3.5" drives and terminate in USB for connection to an internal port, and there are more costly options for 5.25" drives that are more universal. I'll be damned if I pay the asking price for the latter, not that I can find the company selling them either way.

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