Hi Jim, while you can get even mainboards for socket AM3+ with floppy controllers (plus all the modern stuff as USB3) the question is whether you really NEED a floppy today
> My reasons for needing a floppy are: > - development of diskwipe & mbr. it's convenient to make a floppy to > test with rather than making a lot of coasters for every test version > iteration... Since 1996 (!) you can buy rewriteable CD. Or if you need more space, use a rewriteable DVD. Cheap, too :-) > - usb zip drives can't be booted off of with older computers, takes > forever to format with dos. they are also notoriously unreliable for > data. read:click of death ZIP are indeed somewhat odd. But CD/DVD boot nicely. And apparently you can make diskimages which can be BOTH written to CD/DVD and USB and boot from either. With less fancy technology, make one for CD/DVD and another one (FAT based) for booting from USB sticks. > - drivers Drivers? > - sneakernet for small files USB sticks... Not every BIOS supports it and there is the problem of disk change. However, you *could* just reboot DOS after each USB disk change, because DOS boots fast and USB sticks have high capacity so even if your software does not support USB change... > - boot FreeDOS! The normal way for FreeDOS 1.0 was the CD/DVD ISO, I would say. We only have floppy distros for those who do not have CD/DVD drives yet, which are only a small group of users afaik... Also, I think nice ONE floppy distros simply make a nice boot CD/DVD boot floppy image... > I am wondering besides using the virtual floppy driver, how you do > without a floppy to make a bootable cd, hopefully with an image size > that is larger than. A standard BIOS should support 1200k, 1440k and 2880k boot floppy images on a bootable CD/DVD/BD. Also, you can use ISOLINUX and MEMDISK to use a disk image of any other size and boot a CD/DVD/BD from that then :-) Do not worry, ISOLINUX and MEMDISK do not CONTAIN any Linux at all - they are just ABLE to boot Linux... :-) Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Get your Android app more play: Bring it to the BlackBerry PlayBook in minutes. BlackBerry App World™ now supports Android™ Apps for the BlackBerry® PlayBook™. Discover just how easy and simple it is! http://p.sf.net/sfu/android-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
