From: rugx...@gmail.com
> Since you already mentioned "very old floppies", does this mean some> of your
> machines don't have (the appropriately-sized) floppy drives?
Yes, exactly. I didn't elaborate earlier, but that is the case. By floppies,
I'm referring to the 3.5" 1.44mb ones although, I even have a few of the 5.25"
variety. Some of the 5.25" are 360k, but most of them are 1.2mb. At least I
don't have any 160k or 80k types. When the 80k & 160k were being used, I was
probably using cassette tapes. I can say one good thing about the old data
cassette tapes: they made floppy drives seem really fast! :) I was so glad
to finally be able use floppies vs tapes! After I eventually got one, I
thought HDs were so much superior than floppies, speed-wise. (oops! I was
daydreaming of the'old' days again)
You're right though, I have 3 modern PCs with Win 7 on them, none of which have
a floppy drive controller. So, I resurrected an older PC that does have a
floppy controller. It's a P-III 733mhz that used to run Win 98 back in he late
90s. I must say, running old DOS software on the 733 is so much faster than
what I used to run DOS in! I think the latter DOS days were on a 486-66 or
maybe it was the 386-40(not sure), though early on I started on an 8088, 2 360k
floppies, no HD, monochrome (my first 'clone' PC).
> Usually you can insert a USB jump drive before turning on (booting)> and the
> BIOS should emulate it as a DOS drive for you, assuming it's> formatted as
> (some variant of) FAT (-16, -32).>
OK, thanks! I didn't think of that. I'm not 100% sure, but I bet I plugged in
the flash drive _after_ booting as per Win!
> If not, you have to try something like Bret's USB drivers (and your> machine
> must support UHCI)
Sorry, what's UHCI?
> or (from modern Windows) try the RUFUS> (bootable DOS USB) installer.> >
> http://www.bretjohnson.us/> http://rufus.akeo.ie/>
thanx
> So from old machine to new machine? Old machine has floppy but new> doesn't?
> I assume you don't (or can't or won't) have networking on the> old machine
> (understandable! frustrating!). If you did (maybe even> with mTCP + packet
> driver), that'd be one way.
You're right on all counts. I thought about using an ethernet network since
the Win 7 PCs have it but wanted to avoid that headache if possible... :)
> > Otherwise, you have to have some drive (hard? floppy?) to install /> use
> > with the other machine.
I do have a USB floppy drive that _could_ work. Using a flash drive would be
a lot easier though.
> In fact, if you can get USB drive working,> you can copy files to and from
> that with ease. This is probably easier> than constantly burning a CD-RW or
> whatever.
I was thinking by using CDs, though, I would benefit by having a good back-up
and storage would be much more compact, (650mb vs 1.44mb). Storage space is
now a consideration for me especially since floppies are now obsolete?
> > There might be unofficial (buggy?) builds of cdrkit for DOS. I can't>
> > remember the name or version of that alleged DOS (freeware?) CD> burning
> > program, and I'm not sure how well it worked. IIRC, the main> problem was
> > lacking an ASPI.SYS driver, which is proprietary (closed> source, not free
> > nor libre). Hence I don't think FreeDOS proper ships> with such a thing
> > (maybe they had an optional .BAT to use wget to grab> it back in the day,
> > dunnno ...).>
Thanx, for the tips! At least I have some direction to go in now! :)
> > A lot of peripherals depends on decent drivers. I think this is the> main
> > problem (or advantage) with any OS these days. This is one big> reason why
> > people stick to Linux or Windows. Unfortunately, DOS isn't> always
> > supported (well, if at all) by hardware companies. Not trying> to be overly
> > pessimistic, but it's the cold hard truth.> I agree.
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