My laptop does not have an internal floppy disk drive, so I bought an USB floppy disk drive. Unfortunately it cannot read the contents of a 1,6 MB disk. It does show the correct size of the disk, but I cannot see the files on the disk. When I insert the disk into my old computer with an internal floppy I can see the contents of the disk. I bought a 2nd USB FDD from a different manufacturer. Same problem. Is this is a general problem with USB fdd's? I use Windows XP SP3 on both machines. I hope this is just a driver issue. Does anyone know if there are unofficial USB floppy disk drivers available which support more floppy disk types?
1.6mb floppy? Unless it is formatted in a way that gives you 1.6mb from 1.44mb I'm going out on a limb and guessing it won't be readable in that drive at all. Assuming it is a formatting problem I'd try booting it with a Linux live CD to see if Linux supports the filesystem. Windows, afaik, only really does FAT12 on 3.5" floppy disks. You could also load the disc into a hex editor to see if anything is written to the disk that can be read/recovered.
Is it a PC-formatted 1.6MB disk? If so, were you using any extra installed software in order to use it previously? All standard PC disks (not SuperDrive disks) are either 720K or 1.44MB, whilst some other systems (Amiga, Atari, etc.) use more or less of the disk up to its true limit of 2MB. To have a 1.6MB disk would likely involve witchcraft, some kind of christian magic, or an on-boot 'disk expander' (the third is most likely). Most 'disk expander' software accesses the drive's hardware directly in order to push the disk towards its limit - something you would not be able to do via USB.
If you can see the files on your old desktop...why not put the files on different, more modern medium?
There are quite a few ways you can format a 1.44mb disc to have slightly more storage space but most are non standard and will only work on an internal drive. Most USB drives do not have the low level access you get with internal floppies. Although it might be able to read the data to know it's a high density disk it may not be able to read or write to them correctly. Try downloading and formating a floppy with this http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/File-Management/DMF-Utility.shtml The DMF format was used by microsoft for MS-DOS 6 and Windows 3.11. If it works then copy and transfer the discs to this new format. I know that it works fine on my IBM based USB drive.
Or image the thing with something like WinImage. It can handle quite a few formats and should be able to make a 1:1 copy.
USB Floppy Drives suck. Use an older PC or Laptop with internal FDD. While USB Floppy Drives may work for some people with limited need for them I've heard plenty of stories of people having problems with them.
Indeed, most USB drives will support 720K, 1.2MB, 1.44MB and most will do the DMF 1.68MB and some the higher density 1.72MB formats but as they are not designed for low level access you are not going to be able to access weird formats on the discs. You can see the size of the disc as the boot sector is normal and tells the system things like number of sectors, tracks, etc. However it is non standard after this, so you do not see anything else.
Well you are going to be stuffed then as it is unlikely you are going to find a USB FDD that is going to work. If you really must play with the files then your best bet as suggested is to make an image of the disc on your other machine and then copy them to your laptop and then you will be able to open and then play with the images as if they were floppy discs.
http://byuu.org/bsnes/legacy-formats Kinda sounds like the copier dumps the ROMs straight to the floppy without writing them to an actual filesystem. Might try reading the floppies with a hex editor and dumping the data to a file to your harddrive. Then combine each floppy and see if it loads into an emulator (preferably ZSnes or SNES9x). I've never used a copier before so I really don't know for sure. Though you might not be able to read the floppy with a USB floppy drive still either.
PCMCIA floppy drives may read this data but it depends on how the card reads the discs, some use the USB method of having a basic chip that will read 720K and 1.44MB formats but nothing else (sometimes the Japanese 1.2MB and the MDF formats), some will allow you low level access so you can make 82 tracks discs with shorter gaps between sectors but it is going to be hit and miss so you will have to do some research.
This is not true. Most copiers use the standard FAT format for floppy disks. Support for 1.44mb format is always present and support for 720K and 1.6mb formats sometimes are available too. Pretty much this exact problem came up on Tototek's forum recently. I told them to use an older PC with internal FDD and their problems were solved. The USB floppy drives are garbage. It's also not unheard of for newer versions of Windows to be a problem. The ideal machine for dealing with Floppys and Copiers is one with standard internal FDD and Windows XP or older. Vista and Win 7 might work but internal FDD is required.
FAT12. And I hope my point that I really didn't know came across fine, otherwise I really need to work on my forum post wordings. :banghead:
