virtualbox.org

fixedwheel wrote:@mpack i have access to the USB floppy next monday at work

@fixedwheel - same here I don't have access to a Mac host though. However I would consider it a great oversight - and very odd - if I can't access that drive from a Windows guest. The xml syntax allows for other types of plug-in USB hardware (serial ports say) to be identified by their full text label, why not floppy drives?

ChipMcK wrote:Mac host do not have legacy floppy drives.

I don't really see what legacy floppy support has to do with this: IMHO either the host supports floppy type drives now (albeit perhaps a driver is required) or it doesn't. If it does, i.e. if its possible to fit a floppy drive to that host, then ISTM you ought to be able to access that drive from a guest VM. I can't think of any reason why that would be difficult. That's assuming that OSX allows apps to access any drive at a sector level - and I assume it does, since I see that a Mac version of "dd" has been mentioned.

Ok, I'm at work and I just remembered that I wanted to see if a VM can use an external floppy drive connected to a host USB port.

I should mention that I have not upgraded my work copy of VBox to v4 yet, it's still using v3.1.6 and I don't have time to update it just for this test. However I intend to take the USB floppy drive home and I'll repeat the test there where I do use v4.

Other test parameters: XP Pro host, XP Pro guest, Sony MPF88E-UA 2x Speed USB 3.5" Floppy drive, old MSDOS 5.0 setup floppy #1 being used for test purposes. It turns out that this floppy is single sided, i.e. although it's an ordinary looking 3.5" floppy, it only has 720k capacity. Host (modern Core 2 Duo HP Desktop) PC has no built in floppy drives.

Test result: Sony floppy drive appeared on host as drive "A:" when plugged in. VirtualBox 3.1.6 showed this as "Host drive A" in the "Floppy Device" pulldown list. This selection was not available in the list when the USB floppy drive was disconnected. When the floppy drive was selected the VM booted up fine and I was able to access the floppy... however access was extremely slow and text files read from the floppy appeared to be corrupted - though the same files were not corrupted if read by the host. I suspect that both the latter problems was caused by the floppy being 720K instead of 1.44MB: for some reason the VM can't detect that it's a single sided floppy in the drive, though the host could. (Later) I found a more recent 1.44MB floppy and that seemed to work perfectly - no corruption and faster performance, though of course floppies were never very fast.

Later edit: home now, but setup same as above except for VBox version, and I can confirm that v4.0.0 works exactly the same way as above except that the list of host floppy drives/images is accessed via a button instead of an obvious pulldown listbox.