The Teac USB floppy drive I have seems to work in Windows ME, uge! I took the ISA multi I/O card out. Freedos could really use USB floppy and USB cdrom support. USB hard drive support would also be very nice. DOS without floppy drives just isn't DOS. Anymore, you cannot get floppy drives. They have been replaced by zip drives, cdrom drives, dvd drives, Blu Ray drives, LS120 drives etcetera. Modern PC's don't even typically support or even have floppy drives as usb flash drives have replaced them. Unfortunately, 20 years ago floppy drives were ubiquitous and software was designed around them including especially industrial computers. Because programs like QSoft which depend on a DOS based real time system require floppy support to set the dos side up... and the source code is proprietary... Computers like the EVOC that can only use USB floppy drives may not work. Freedos doesn't like the USB floppy drive complaining that it reports 0 sectors/track and when I try to format a floppy I get Critical error duing int 13 disk access... Seek failed. Highly likely as the EVOC does not have a traditional floppy controller that it does not provide the typical BIOS interface. Assuming the floppy emulation is standard, there should be the possibility of a TSR or a new kernel that can detect and use USB floppy drives and CDROM/hard drives. I have a USB 128 gig M disc drive that is also a 3D blu ray drive that I can boot freedos from, but I cannot run the live system fully. Freedos expects an IDE ATAPI or possibly a SATA ATAPI drive, not a USB ATAPI drive. If someone could increase freedos's support for USB storage devices, that would be ideal.
Clearly, USB floppy drives are not something freedos handles well. Might be a buggy AMI bios in this Chinese sourced EVOC, but Teac USB floppy drives are common. March 8, 2020 7:06 PM, mich...@robinson-west.com (mailto:mich...@robinson-west.com) wrote: Trying to use the Freedos 1.3 live cd to get a dos prompt and test formatting floppies. My hardware is special. I'm using a PICMG 1.0 passive backplane or more specifically the HPP 14S backplane. I'm using an EVOC FSC-1740VNA single board computer. This SBC does not have an onboard floppy controller. I'm using an ISA multi I/O card with a floppy controller, but note that the EVOC is designed for a USB floppy. The reason I'm trying to use a real floppy controller is that the usb floppy support in Windows 9x is reportedly broken and needs some patch. If anyone knows of this patch, please tell me. I'm getting some sort of DMA overrun trying to format a floppy in freedos... -- Michael Robinson
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