CraigAB69 wrote on 2022-06-15, 02:50:Sorry guys, […]
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Sorry guys,
Honestly, I forget that I am dealing with technical people. I am so used to dumbing things down, that it has become a habbit. Sorry.
Ok, so I have a Dell D800. I can just copy most old software off the floppy image to a directory and install from there. But things like Microsoft C 7.0 wants to see the floppy disks (Images).
The D800 can see a USB floppy device so that works. So if I can use the emulator I can load all the floppy images on to a USB key and go from there.
Cheers,
Craig
Actually there are several ways to achieve that, if what you need is to "mount" floppy images to install old software distributed in multiple disks.
1. Use a virtual floppy driver such as VFD to create a virtual A: and mount your images there, one by one, as instructed by the installer. Useful if the installation actually accesses A: regardless of where it was run, or it needs to access additional information in the disk image (such as the volume label, boot sector, or other data commonly used for copy protection purposes).
2. Extract each disk to separate folders and use the SUBST command to associate A: with the path where the floppy disk contents reside. Once you are done with one folder, use SUBST A: /D to delete the previous association then associate the next one. SUBST command has existed for quite a while, even Windows NT 3.51 has it. Note that depending on how the installation process work, if it was only designed to check the root of the drive letter it was run from, and not hardcoded to access A:, you may use whatever drive letter you want.
3. Some old Windows software actually expects files of each disk to be placed in folders like DISK1, DISK2, and so on. In that case, simply extract the disk contents to respective folders and the installer will pick them up without even prompting you to insert the next disk throughout the install process.
4. Some other software, namely ones that use InstallShield for installer, may behave the opposite to the case above. For InstallShield based installers you may need to put all the CAB files (e.g. data1.cab, data2.cab, ...) in the same folder for it to work, though it may allow you to manually specify where the files on the next disk are and it can be anywhere and does not have to be a floppy drive.