virtualbox.org

Hi I want to add a 3.5 inch floppy drive to my Virtualbox. I'm running Windows XP inside VB on a latop running Windows 7 home. The floppy connects to the laptop via a USB port. However when booting into VB the only drives shown are the Hard dive and CD drive. How do I get VB to recognise the 'A' drive floppy. Thanks.

In "Settings | Storage" for the VM, first add a new controller to the storage tree (3rd icon of the four near the bottom) and specify it as a floppy disk controller. Then add a floppy disk drive to this controller. You can then specify this as "Host Drive A:"

A warning, though: USB floppy drives do not work well this way. You will probably be able to read such a disk but not write it. Rather than using "Host Drive A:" it is much more reliable to use floppy disk image files, which you then read from or write to a physical floppy using the host.

dlharper wrote:In "Settings | Storage" for the VM, first add a new controller to the storage tree (3rd icon of the four near the bottom) and specify it as a floppy disk controller. Then add a floppy disk drive to this controller. You can then specify this as "Host Drive A:"

A warning, though: USB floppy drives do not work well this way. You will probably be able to read such a disk but not write it. Rather than using "Host Drive A:" it is much more reliable to use floppy disk image files, which you then read from or write to a physical floppy using the host.

Thanks for your reply dl. I dont see an option 'Storage' under 'Settings'. The four options are: Control Panel, Network connections, Printers and faxes, Task bar and Start menu. Do I have a wrong version?

Cheers

Look in the VirtualBox settings.

loukingjr wrote:Look in the VirtualBox settings.

Aha.. Many thanks.

Welcome.

loukingjr wrote:Look in the VirtualBox settings.

All the options under 'Storage' are greyed out?

You have to shutdown the guest before you can change most settings.

loukingjr wrote:Welcome.

Wait. Have to shutdown the guest...

Still beavering away...

Hi, I got as far as this screen. I added the Floppy controller and got a dialogue box with three options: Leave empty, Choose disk and Cancel. Choosing 'Choose disk' led to the attached screen. I dont see an 'A' drive. Where do I go from here? I appreciate you help.

I suggest you go back and read the earlier posts in the thread. In the first reply you received, dharper recommended to you that you use floppy drive images rather than the physical drive (even if you had one). If you don't have a physical floppy drive, they are your only option. If you don't know what they are Google virtual floppy image files. Asking question after question is a pretty slow way of getting this working.

Your original question "How to add a floppy drive in VB" has already been answered.

You must have an A: drive on the host for it to appear in the options. Is you floppy drive connected?

If you want to use a physical host drive you also need to go back a step. The dialog shown appears after you tell VirtualBox that you want to select a floppy image file. Before that dialog should have been a menu from which you selected the type of media you wanted to mount in the virtual drive. The options would have been Empty, <list of compatible host drives>, and image file. <List of compatible drives> would be an empty list if no working floppy drive was plugged into the host.

dlharper wrote:You must have an A: drive on the host for it to appear in the options. Is you floppy drive connected?

Yes it dl. It shows up in W7 and works fine.

mpack wrote:If you want to use a physical host drive you also need to go back a step. The dialog shown appears after you tell VirtualBox that you want to select a floppy image file. Before that dialog should have been a menu from which you selected the type of media you wanted to mount in the virtual drive. The options would have been Empty, <list of compatible host drives>, and image file. <List of compatible drives> would be an empty list if no working floppy drive was plugged into the host.

But it is plugged into the host. It shows in W7 and works fine.