Reading a 720 kB floppy?

E

ehurtley

Member
I have already given up on having Parallels directly support accessing a real USB floppy drive the way it can access the real physical optical drive...

But now I'm having the problem that Parallels says that 720 KB floppy disk images are invalid. I have tried creating them with OS X's Disk Utility from a USB floppy drive, and WinImage on a true-blue Windows machine with an internal floppy drive. 1.4 MB images (as .dmg renamed to .fdd from OS X, and as raw .vfd from WinImage,) work just fine. But 720 KB images don't.

For some old programs, I can just copy the files from the floppies directly onto the mounted .hdd image, and install from a directory on the virtual machine. For others, I can just mount the 720 KB image and a blank 1.4 MB image in OS X, copy the files from one to the other, then use the functioning 1.4 MB image in the virtual machine.

But I also have a couple of boot disks that I want to mount, and neither method works.
 
ehurtley said:
Please click one of the Quick Reply icons in the posts above to activate Quick Reply.
Click to expand...

IBM-DOS (aka MS-DOS) 3.3. I have a client with a positively ancient payroll system that for some strange reason won't run on MS-DOS 6.22, or any Windows. His IBM PC-AT is failing, and I'm trying to see if it will run in Parallels on his MacBook Pro.

Plus, I'd like to have it for less "useful" reasons... Once upon a time, I had VirtualPC machines of about 15 different OSes, including MS-DOS 3.3 (basically the entire history of Microsoft OSes, plus some OS/2.) I lost my collection of OSes in a hard drive crash, and have been re-building them in Parallels recently. My only 3.5" copies of DOS 3 and 5 are on 720 KB floppies, though. (I had to go find new copies of MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1, though, disk 2 of DOS and disk 4 of Windows in my old copies had died.)
 
try collaborating with the government archives
who have the same problems of conserving old data

what about the latets Microsoft Virtual Technology ?
I see reports of this in the press

they purchased a VM software company a couple of years back

Hugh W
 
P.S., I finally solved it by downloading the trial of VMWare Fusion, installing in VMWare, then using Parallels Transporter to convert the VMWare disk image to a Parallels image.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top