How to use floppy drives in VPC

[sparkeh]

If you have used the latest version of Virtual PC you may have noticed that you cannot use the GUI to attach a floppy drive.

The MS answer to this is to use a Powershell script

I appear to have stumbled on a much easier way to do this as the vmc file for your virtual machine has floppy support all ready coded in but is disabled. Simply power off your machine and change the following section of your vmc file from

<super_io>
    <floppy id="0">
        <pathname>
            <absolute type="string"/>
        </pathname>
    </floppy>
........
</super_io>

to

<super_io>
    <floppy id="0">
        <pathname>
            <absolute type="string">A</absolute>
        </pathname>
    </floppy>
........
</super_io>

Use the letter of the physical drive that you wish to attach to the VM and it appears when you start the machine. It can even be used to boot a machine for CC3 building and the like.

[danbuntu]

what's a floppy drive?

[sparkeh]

what's a floppy drive?

That's what MS ask as well

Dropping floppy support from VPC is quite ridiculous as its purely a decision from MS that they no longer want to support them. The support is built in and working but taken away from the GUI.

I know that people could argue that the floppy drive is old tech but there is a sizeable chuck of VPC users who use it to run legacy systems which require a floppy. That (surprisingly angry and vocal) market is now going to shift to another offering that does support the floppy (ie any of the other VM solutions).

[creese]

what's a floppy drive?

That would be one that has never answered a V1agr@ email offer.