Boot physical 3.5" floppies via emulated floppy image on CD

[Stone]

The main reason I use these is being able to boot from a thumb drive, which is handy for
shuttling data w/o the hassle of setting up a net connection.

Why do you need to boot from the thumb drive to shuttle data from it?

 

[bocke]

If you really need something akin to that, take a look at hardware emulators like Gotek floppy emulator: http://www.ebay.com/bhp/usb-floppy-emulator. These things usually work by loading a floppy image from img files on SD card or USB stick. Although I can't guarantee you can boot off of them.

But I see only a limited number of uses for this on a modern PC. Actually, probably only use I might see, if it's possible to boot from this kind of a device at all, is installing retro OSes that came on floppies (like early Linux distributions or early versions of 386BSD/NetBSD/FreeBSD). But I wouldn't use a modern PC for that anyway (drivers!) so...

 

[buckchow]

If you really need something akin to that, take a look at hardware emulators like Gotek floppy emulator: http://www.ebay.com/bhp/usb-floppy-emulator. These things usually work by loading a floppy image from img files on SD card or USB stick. Although I can't guarantee you can boot off of them.

Thanks for the suggestion, but those don't meet my criteria. Those floppy emulator devices allow virtual disks to appear as physical disks to a real floppy controller. My goal is to boot and use physical disks on systems that don't have a floppy controller.

I haven't had a chance to tinker with the Plop Boot Manager suggested earlier, but it seems likely to be my best option so far. If I can set up a CD/DVD drive or a bootable USB drive to run it and then have it automatically boot from a USB floppy drive I should be in good shape.

 

[philscomputerlab]

There is a GOTEK with USB interface. It's basically a external USB floppy drive, but used a USB stick instead of floppies. Just use an internal PCI USB controller card to connect it. Having 1000 disks on a single USB stick is really awesome.

Still, I don't see the issue with a real floppy controller. Up to Core 2 Duo and AM2+ this is really standard stuff. Anything newer will boot from anything USB anyway.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

There's not much you can't do with DOSBox. So far, the only thing I've been unable to do with it is slice bread.

You should upgrade to the latest version - I hear it can do that, three different ways.

 

[ChrisUnionNJ]

The HXC might be a good option I have a few of them
never tried it on a PC..

http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emulator/

 

[SkydivinGirl]

Buslink made a USB floppy drive with a full size 1.44MB floppy drive in it. I swapped out the floppy drive with a HxC Rev. F floppy emulator and it works perfectly for booting floppy images and swapping through them. I'm sure you could use the Buslink with any floppy emulator that is compatible with PCs. The problem is finding the Buslink FDD1.



My thread about this on AmiBay:
http://www.amibay.com/showthread.php?40298-HxC-SD-Rev-F-as-a-USB-Floppy-Drive

I'd be interested to hear how it works out!

Heather