How to allow writing to physical floppys in MS-DOS 6.22?

[Polda18]

I use MS-DOS guest for playing old games on my Windows 7 machine (without the virtualisation it won't work) and I would like to make some testing programs (for example to play Happy Birthday song via PC speaker or make a simple game based on the ones played on the paper). Making the game I would like to have it backed up on the floppy to install it possibly later, but without ability to write on physical floppy regardless it is switched to protected mode or not it will be impossible... Is there any option to allow writing to physical floppy (meaning if set to not protected)?

[dlharper]

Writing direct to floppies does seem erratic. I have dried it with a USB floppy drive plugged into a Windows 7 host, and as with yourself it will read but not write from a VM (and the reading is a bit uncertain).

Can I suggest that you use virtual floppy images, which work perfectly from within VirtualBox. Use the host to create images of the disks you want to use (Google something like "create floppy image" for lots of possible utilities.) Make an image of an empty (formatted) disk, and make as many copies as you like of this. Save your files from the guest to these images.

For back-up just copy these image files to your backup store. You could write the images back to floppies, but what's the point? Just using images takes up less room anyway.

Just a couple of things to watch:

• Stick with 1.44Mb (or of necessary 720kb) images. There are ways of getting VirtualBox to work with 5.25" image sizes, but these make things unnecessairly complicated.
• Use a single floppy drive (Drive A:). Trying to use a separate Drive B: just does not work.

[Polda18]

Can I suggest that you use virtual floppy images, which work perfectly from within VirtualBox. Use the host to create images of the disks you want to use (Google something like "create floppy image" for lots of possible utilities.) Make an image of an empty (formatted) disk, and make as many copies as you like of this. Save your files from the guest to these images.

For back-up just copy these image files to your backup store. You could write the images back to floppies, but what's the point? Just using images takes up less room anyway.

I know, but where I will store my backups of my projects if something goes wrong on my desktop and I won't be able to restore data on hard drive for some reason? Answer is physical floppy, which still works. And I can make some additional backups on flash drive if floppy drive extincts at some point...

Just a couple of things to watch:

• Stick with 1.44Mb (or of necessary 720kb) images. There are ways of getting VirtualBox to work with 5.25" image sizes, but these make things unnecessairly complicated.
• Use a single floppy drive (Drive A:). Trying to use a separate Drive B: just does not work.

I find this info useless as I never though about having two floppy drives on my machine eighter in real and virtual. And I use only 3,5" floppy which is size our drive has...

[dlharper]

I know, but where I will store my backups of my projects if something goes wrong on my desktop and I won't be able to restore data on hard drive for some reason? Answer is physical floppy, which still works. And I can make some additional backups on flash drive if floppy drive extincts at some point...

I don't see your problem here. You can back them up to DVD, External HD, Cloud, or whatever you like. You must have somewhere you normally back up your data (I assume ) so why not include the floppy disk images in the backup?

If your hard disk crashes, then you can reinstall VirtualBox on the new one, install DOS and your application on this, and your floppy disk images are there along with everything else you have backed up.

[Polda18]

Let the story begin:
I have my floppy images backed up both on internal HDD and external HDD. I accidentaly run something that crashes and make the internal HDD dead. I need to replace it and install Windows and everything I had on it again. Luckily external HDD was not harmed (I think). But it won't load in Windows. Where to get the images? Both previous internal disk and external disk cannot boot and these were the only devices I had images on.

Let another story begin:
I back up images also on flash disk. For some reason my flash disk stops working. But I have it on my HDD. Boom, something happens to disk and I need to buy new. All data lost, but data in images the most important. Oh that shame!

Since physical floppy disks and physical floppy drive still working even after more than 10 years (I still have old floppy's with old games in my desk) and since floppy disks contain data in similar way as tapes contain audio and/or video without any need of some electric power to run through the disk when reading and writing, it seems still one of best ways of archive and backup data, alongside with CD's and DVD's... Using flash disks also one of best, but much more sensible to harm.

If there is no way to enable direct writing to physical floppy, I will use some bypass.

[mpack]

A conservative calculation tells me that a CD-ROM can contain over 400 1.44MB floppy images. I don't dare calculate how many would fit on a DVD-ROM. And, neither of these is subject to mechanical wear or demagnetization.

I have no idea why anyone would want to use a 30 year old storage technology to back up anything in this day and age.

[michaln]

Have to agree with the others... floppies are about the least reliable backup medium ever. Don't get me wrong, factory-recorded floppies are typically readable without errors after 20-30 years, but the quality of consumer drives and especially media is so erratic that it's just not worth the effort. User-written floppies have an annoyingly high error rate, in addition to being tiny and awfully slow.

There's no backup medium that's failsafe -- hard disks, tapes, CD-ROMs, flash drives, SSDs, they all can (and do) fail. CDs/DVDs and flash drives are least prone to mechanical failure, and CDs/DVDs are also immune to magnetic/electrical fields unlike the rest.

In my experience, a NAS with RAID storage and regular hard disks provides the best compromise between speed/reliability/convenience.

[Polda18]

RAID seems too nobless and what you say about customer floppies is true for chinesse fakes. I had never aby error with our floppies for personal records and they are about twenty years old... What a surprise! :O And don't get me wrong that I am just used to old technology only, I use flash drives and external USB hard disk too... I burn DVD's and CD's. And I know bluray now trends, but it is too expensive for me now... The best do not mean the cheapest... Of you want complete I use also cloud drive... Thanks for listen

[michaln]

RAID seems too nobless and what you say about customer floppies is true for chinesse fakes.

If only. Verbatim, Sony, whatever... they're all bad. And RAID is cheap nowadays.

I had never aby error with our floppies for personal records and they are about twenty years old... What a surprise! :O

If you are only using the 20-year old floppies that are still error free then I fully believe that you got rid of all the bad ones over the years. Or the disks were made before the quality started going downhill.

My experience with floppies is in fact from 20+ years ago and they were unreliable back then. Not all of them, and especially pre-recorded ones were good. But overall unreliable.

[mpack]

Dysan used to offer a lifetime guarantee on their 5.25" floppies (and certainly mine were still readable after spending 25 years on a shelf).

Dysan went bust. Make of that what you will.

[Polda18]

RAID is cheap nowadays.

In fact I don't know how it costs. Fact I like old technology doesn't mean I am used only to these one. I just don't have enough money to replace all outdated mediums by the new ones and if it still works without any noticeable flaw, why to trash it? (yes, the speed is a bit annoying, but not enough to get rid of that)... I have still old tape with my recordings back from 2006 and plays overall good. I'm about to stay with old until it die...

If you are only using the 20-year old floppies that are still error free then I fully believe that you got rid of all the bad ones over the years. Or the disks were made before the quality started going downhill.

Maybe the second. Or it is just that the floppies were made here in Czechoslovakia, which usualy means good quality for over few decades...

My experience with floppies is in fact from 20+ years ago and they were unreliable back then. Not all of them, and especially pre-recorded ones were good. But overall unreliable.

Maybe the chinesse ones. I think the 80's ones are the good from the customer pieces. The factory recorded cannot be written on, only read, it's similar to setup CD, only to copy files from it over to the HDD. Maybe that's why it's working so good after 20+ years. As I stated before, I want to use it to store only DOS materials (my future retro-programming projects), the modern ones are on modern mediums like flash drive or cloud server...

[mpack]

The question about how long floppy media lasts is rather beside the point, if you can't get a floppy drive for your future PC.

[Polda18]

Now it's retro time, when gramophone players are now back made, why not floppy drives? If not, it should not be that hard to connect your old floppy drive in your new computer, or it should? What type of connector floppy drive use? It should be ATA, shouldn't it? Say...

Also programmer could write a small program for reduction floppy drive connector to USB connection and make selfmade USB powered external floppy drive

[mpack]

No no, floppy drives predate ATA by a long way. Look in your VM setting - it has a special controller, the FDC or floppy disk controller. Typically this is included in the motherboard chipset of legacy PCs.

None of my PCs have internal floppy drives, that has been the case for at least 5 years now. I do have an external USB floppy drive, but will those be available in 20 years? I don't see why they would.

In any case the whole notion is frankly ludicrous. Most modern files won't even fit on a floppy. I have here a 256GB NTFS USB3 flash drive. Do I prefer that or a 1.44MB FAT12 snail speed and noisy floppy? I'll leave that as an open question.

[ikar.us]

No no, floppy drives predate ATA by a long way. Look in your VM setting - it has a special controller, the FDC or floppy disk controller. Typically this is included in the motherboard chipset of legacy PCs.

And this isn't a data bus interface like ATA, but a real controller, that generates electrical signals for the discrete electromechanical components of the drive. There used to be MFM HDs, too...