please inset disk in drive A

[Gorden]

I am using Fedora 11 as the operating system and have installed XP sp2 as a guest under Virtualbox 2.2.4.
I can mount and unmount the floppy in linux and read its director
The floppy is showing as 1.44 MB in the Bios
I have a boot sequence set up floppy, CD, hard disk for XP.
When I start XP it looks at the floppy drive and if there is a non system disk in there it notifies me that there is a "non system disk. I remove it and the system will continue to boot.
I then open up "My Computer" in XP and the Floppy drive as drive A can be seen.
If I click on the icon I get a message "Please insert a disk in drive A"

I can mount, in Devices, the floppy which is designated as fd0, go to the XP floppy icon and try to open it to see a directory but I get the same message "Please insert a disk in drive A". tried all sorts of combinations of unmount, mount, rebooting with selecting the floppy drive in devices before starting XP etc but I always end up with the same result "Please insert a disk in drive A"

Also tried making sure the floppy is mounted in Fedora 11 before starting XP or mounting the floppy in Fedora after XP is running.
Nothing seems to work.

As strange as it may seem I need a floppy to be able to install a particular windows based software package. The floppy has copy protction on it which can not be copied.

Can anyone point me in the right direction to enable me to solve this issue.

Thanks

[mpack]

I then open up "My Computer" in XP and the Floppy drive as drive A can be seen.
If I click on the icon I get a message "Please insert a disk in drive A"

That is standard behaviour for XP - you get this on physical XP machines that don't have a floppy drive at all. The presence of the "A:" drive in explorer does not mean that XP sees a floppy in the drive, it just means that it's detected a floppy controller interface.

I have a feeling that you are confused by the distinction between physical devices visible to the host (none of which are visible to the guest), and virtual devices visible to the guest. Are you creating an image of the floppy disk and mounting it inside the guest?

Edit: . Ah, just noticed your sentence about the floppy being copy protected. I would try copying it anyway (creating an image), just to prove it won't work. Then, if it doesn't, go to VM settings, floppy, mount the host drive.

[Gorden]

thanks.

My understanding was that you could, from "Devices" go the the "Mount" for the floppy, select PC Floppy (/dev/fd0). Plce a floppy disk in the drive, double click on the floppy icon in XP Explorer and read the files on the disk. It is when I do this that I see the message "please insert disk in drive A".

The rest of what I wrote was an attempt to show that the drive works. What I have noticed is that if i have a floppy disk in the drive and then boot XP I get a message as XP boots that the disk "is not a system disk etc) so the windows book process sees the floppy ok. It is once Xp is running that XP itself can not longer see or read the disk in the floppy drive. I can not see any reason as to why this should occur. I have looked up the issue on the internet for XP and see that others have had the issue with XP but there seems to be no advise on how to fix it. I have tried a couple of he suggestions but none has worked.

I will try to copy the disk and make an image, as you have suggested, when I find out how to do it.

[mpack]

Another thing you could try is do the same thing with any other floppy, to see if the XP guest has equal problems reading it. I'm afraid I can't experiment for you for several reasons (I'm not a Fedora user, and besides that my PC doesn't have a physical floppy drive).

I don't hold out much hope for the floppy image working. Write protected floppies usually contained a deliberate bad sector or two, I don't know if there's any way to mark sectors as bad in a floppy image, and get VBox to return the appropriate errors (ISTR you can mark a sector as bad in the FAT, but that probably isn't enough).

[stpierre]

This may be too late to do anyone else any good, but I found this post while looking for an answer to a similar problem.

I, too, am running Fedora 11 with VirtuaBox 3.0.12. When I inserted a floppy in the drive, booted a Windows XP SP2 guest, and double clicked on floppy A: under My Computer, I also got "please insert disk in drive A:" I had mounted the device in the VM under Devices before booting the guest OS.

My workaround was mount the floppy as root in Linux first:

# cd /mnt
# mkdir floppy
# mount -t msdos /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
# cd floppy
# ls (* just to make sure it really mounted and everything is there *)

I then start VirtualBox as a regular user, make sure the floppy is mounted under Devices for the guest (WinXP) and boot the guest OS, double click on floppy A: under My Computer, and finally see all the files I need.

This floppy, too, has a copy protection scheme on it that merely prevented the DOS command "copy A: B:" from running correctly. But the individual files could be selected and copied manually without any problems. So in this particular case, copy protection was not part of the "please insert disk in drive A:" problem.

What I don't have a workaround for yet is getting Linux or the guest OS to recognize when a diskette is swapped out with a different one. When I do this, I'm back to "please insert disk in drive A:" I found I have to unmount the floppy in Linux, swap diskettes, remount the floppy, and reboot the guest OS. This obviously will not work well in a multi-floppy install where you're prompted to "Please insert disk X in drive A:"

[mpack]

Personally I think it's much simpler to image all the floppies first, creating virtual floppies which can be mounted directly in the guest. That way the issues surrounding how you access the host drive become irrelevant. Same with CDs: stop fighting the host for control, just create an ISO image of the CD, and mount that in the VM for its exclusive use. Disk images always give less hassle than accessing a host drive.