Floppy Disk in Windows 7

[74birdman]

Had this same issue with a Gigabyte AMD board. Found answer from user DataTrain Elite on another forum. Went into the motherboards bios, in power settings disable HPET. High Precision Event Timer. Save and reboot.
Solved the formatting issue for me.

 

[TerrifiedCitizen]

This problem of accessing older floppies is as old as Windows 7 is; it's boring and a workaround should have been delivered before now, not to mention it never should have been left out of version 7 to begin with.
Please suggest an MS or 3rd party utility program that will enable Win7 users (any version) to access files on their older library of floppy diskettes. Users really shouldn't have to maintain two different computers; one with Win7 and one with XP or an even older Win version just so they can read their drawers full of floppies.
If MS was planning all along to make obsolete those diskette libraries kept and yet to be converted to whatever media is all the rage in the moment, there should have been plenty of advanced and clear-cut warnings of such an intent. It's not a question of what removable drives or media are better or worse; there are thousands of long-time users out there who simply haven't had the luxury of having nothing better to do with their time than sit and transfer valuable older files to newer cutting edge media... of which there is never an end to anyway.
I began when all there was, was DOS... using Win-7 64bit Hm currently... and almost ready to switch back to punch-cards again; they were wonderful.

 

[fliptron]

I had this problem too. The fix reported by 74birdman solved the problem.
Don't know what side effects there will be for disabling HPET.

System is [FONT=&quot]GIGABYTE GA-870A-UD3 RT mother board,
W7 Pro 64
16 GB Main memory
CPU is AMD Phenom II, 6 cor, 3GHz
oh, and 10 TB of disk

And now the floppy works too.


Thanks[/FONT]

 

[cdas55]

Need some information from you tech people, please.

Hope I can find some help. I'm not real high tech.
I work in the legal community and I have just received 48 extremely important floppys. I need to open them and possibly convert them to PDF or something. They are all word files.
The floppys were produced in 2002 on an IBM Format. They are also listed as ASCII disks.
I have an old external floppy drive but it just will not work on my new Windows 7 compluter.
Can anyone out there tell me what I need to be able to view these disks, and maybe copy them into some other program like PDF or WordPerfect (or even word).
They are really important disks. The content is critical.
Hope you can help.

 

[fliptron]

Hope I can find some help. I'm not real high tech.
I work in the legal community and I have just received 48 extremely important floppys.

... etc ...
.

Since you only need to do this once, I would recommend finding someone with an older computer running Windows XP, and with a floppy drive. Read the floppies on that computer, and save the files to a USB drive. Then load them into the W7 system from the USB drive.

 

[judgecrater]

cdas,
You can purchase for about $25 an external floppy drive. It plugs into a USB port. Should work fine.
It does not rely on your computer having a floppy drive interace on your motherboard.

 

[johnggold]

Floppies are OK

Most floppy drives these days are used to transfer low volume data to machinery. There are loads of DOS based machines using floppies for machine control. Many are DOS based but many read floppies at low level from PLC's and are not upgradeable.

Saying use a USB stick is a bit like saying that everyone should use a sledgehammer because it has more power, when you just want to knock in small nails every day.

Floppies will be needed for years to come. Floppy to USB Converters are around but they cannot fit most machines, and are very expensive.

On my PC, Windows 7 seems to have trouble formatting & writing to floppy
disk.

I tried to format a floppy disk with Windows 7 but it took quite a while to
get to 100% and when it did, it came up with 'Unable to complete Format'.

To start with, I thought the drive itself was knackered but after swapping
it with a known working one, it did the same thing. I was able to format
the disk with Windows XP no problem.

This is with Windows 7 64-bit. I have seen other postings on various sites
with people having the same problem. I just wondered if there is a
solution?

Thanks

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[PaulS.]

Old thread bump, sorry, but I'm stuck.
One CAM lathes in our shop still runs DOS off of floppy's. I need a new floppy disk for the operating system. Windows 7 doesn't let you format a floppy on a USB connected floppy drive.
Did anybody come up with a solution?
The computer in the machine is a custom unit that loads OS and drivers from the program. There is no support from the factory to update the computer in that machine.

 

[johnggold]

Old thread bump, sorry, but I'm stuck.
One CAM lathes in our shop still runs DOS off of floppy's. I need a new floppy disk for the operating system. Windows 7 doesn't let you format a floppy on a USB connected floppy drive.
Did anybody come up with a solution?
The computer in the machine is a custom unit that loads OS and drivers from the program. There is no support from the factory to update the computer in that machine.

If the floppy drive has standard connections, replace with USB converter drive. Available loads of places - I normally get mine from ebay. Costs about £35.00 per unit.

Then you can use a USB memory stick - more reliable and the CNC machine will never know anything has changed.

If you insist on using floppies on a Win 7 machine avoid the external drives - they give lots of trouble when linking to machinery. Buy a standard internal floppy and use that. PCs always have the floppy connection on the mother board - just not used.

There is also a problem with floppies on Win 7 to do with caching, which results in flush commands not working. Turn of disc caching, and you will probably find the problem of formatting goes away.

 

[PaulS.]

Thanks JOHNGGOLD, that's an immense help. I didn't know such a thing existed. I have ordered a couple to play with and will report back. The help with the disc cache thing also made the windows 7 play nice with the floppy format, as well as a little more research got the writing to the discs to work as well. So better on both fronts.

Thanks,

PaulS.
"never underestimate the perversity of an inanimate object."

 

[PaulS.]

Just a quick Comment to Mr Gold.
I purchased this:
http://www.amazon.com/Updated-Versi...ulator/dp/B00C4PCK9S/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
and put it into our machine.
Once you spend the hours needed to figure out the quirks of the poorly written Chinese software they work! Our machine can now be shut down and restarted without being afraid of whether or not the floppy drive will decide it want to restart.
I needed three of the emulators. Two for the machine, the a drive has the main program, and the b drive holds the programs the main program runs. The third drive went into a computer so that the old floppies can be converted as needed onto the thumb drive.
There were a couple of problems
the afor mentioned crappy software.
they are EXTREMELY sensitive to any bad sector in the usb drive you are trying to use.
You need some sort of paperwork to keep track of which program is on which number of "floppy" you are using on the usb drive. IE there's no sort of "umbrella" on the emulator that allows the contents of the usb to be read. This is on the machine. If you put the usb stick in a computer and use their software you can read what it is, but then you have to put the usb stick in the emulator, physically push the buttons to get the "floppy:" you want, then read the floppy. Cumbersome, but better than the alternative.

Any way, all this to say "THANKS"
oh, and one other thing. I found out, the hard way, that any bios made in the last few years has the capability of only one floppy. I had grand dreams of putting a standard floppy in one bay, and the emulator in the other to make the copying of files painless. I got dissed. Only works if you put an external usb drive in, which means you have an extra piece of hardware waving around in the breeze, which in our shop environment is a bad thing.

 

[Dick]

I was having the same problems as Jim P above. I tried different USB floppy drives to no avail, tried same drives in other W7 PCs, still no good.
Then I stumbled across a PCLine USB drive (PCL-EFD2X) and this worked perfectly on all PCs that previously failed to read the disks. The previous USB Floppy drive models used were "USB FDD Module YD-8U10" part No. 90.42F05.002 no apparent 'make' on label? (these would not read the disks)
Hope this helps someone!