I'm aware of the floppy emulators that are installed to 3.5' bays where 'disks' are stored on a flash drive. But what I need now is the opposite - essentially a USB dongle that emulates the floppy drive hardware with a disk inside. Something that older OS installers would recognize.

The need came up when I tried to install Windows XP on a laptop. The only way to load the AHCI drivers is via a floppy drive. I have a USB floppy drive, but no disks at the moment :( and obviously there is no 3.5' bay to install the typical emulator in a laptop.

I know I can always just buy some floppies, and in fact I have some on the way, but given the reliability of floppies over time, I still feel that what I'm describing would often come in handy.

Does anyone make/sell these?

5 Answers

I don't think anyone sells something like that in one piece.

There are, however, components on the market that should allow you to build that from scratch:

1. A GoTek or HxC that behaves like a 'real' floppy
2. An old Floppy-to-USB adapter that was used to connect 'real' floppies over USB. I don't think they're still made, so you would need to source one from eBay. Newer USB floppy drives no longer have this as I have learned from answers to this question.
3. Some sort of external power supply, as the GoTek/HxC will not be willing to live from the USB power supply.

Putting it all together would end you up with something that behaves like a real floppy, connected over USB.

This is, however, never going to be a full replacement for a 'real' floppy disk drive. Old computer's abilities to for example boot from USB floppies have always been very limited (even if they could always boot very well from standard floppy drives). Once you find one that does this, it will most probably also boot from a standard USB flash stick.

You'd probably be much better off by buying a bunch of HD disks and storing them well.

Another, entirely different, but possibly long-term method to make Windows XP think it has a floppy drive would be a virtual floppy driver. This just emulates a floppy based on an image stored on hard disk and could be a solution for many problems. You'd obviously need to have a drive and disk first in order to pull the images from 'real' disks.

There's no way a USB anything can transparently emulate a floppy drive without a driver being preinstalled.

The traditional PC floppy drive was an ISA device and appeared on specific I/O ports (0x3F0 to 0x3F6 IIRC). Reading and writing to these ports was how you talked to the floppy drive.

USB peripherals talk to a USB controller, but do not otherwise have a connection to the system bus. So they cannot appear at the x86 I/O addresses where something expecting a traditional floppy would be trying to read/write.

USB keyboards and mice look like PS/2 device to DOS and BIOS by a sleight of hand called 'System Management Mode' - unfortunately this is part of BIOS/UEFI firmware and not easily/publicly available to operating systems to customize.

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It may be possible for a device or software to hook into BIOS routines that read/write to the floppy, but by the time you get to that prompt in the Windows XP installer, Windows is already running and not using the BIOS to read/write to devices.

Really doing this would at least require a direct connection to the ISA or PCI/PCI-E bus. And many motherboard chipsets already have a Super I/O chip or equivalent that acts as a floppy controller, and already appears in those locations.

The HxC devices mentioned by @tofro are probably what you want. Search for 'cf card floppy emulator.'

Seems like the answer is NO. While others here have helpfully suggested workarounds to try, the answer as to whether the piece of hardware I asked about exists in a single piece is NO.

You can install xp in IDE mode and install the AHCI drivers afterwards, I did this on my netbook several times. I think it goes something like:Set disk controller to IDE mode in bios, and install XP.In device manager go to the disk controller and manually change the driver to the AHCI one.Reboot into bios and change disk controller to AHCI mode.Save and reboot, XP should now load sucessfully.If you miss any step you will likely get the BSOD.

The emulator that you want does exist. You are looking for an emulator that emulates a USB Floppy Drive. So the emulator connects to the computer via a USB cable, and the storage media is a USB Flash Drive.

Do a Google search on 'UFA1M44-100' and you will find one model of emulator that emulates a USB Floppy Drive. You can find another company that sells these if you do a Google search on 'IntelliRob Systems'. Look in the menu on the left side of their pages for '1.44 MB (USB) acts as USB Floppy Drive'.

I was trying to find a way to get a USB Flash Drive to act as a floppy without any emulator, but I finally gave up and started to look for a regular USB Floppy Drive. That is when I stumbled upon these USB Floppy Drive Emulators. I've already bought a USB Floppy Drive, but these emulators still interest me, so I may yet buy one. If you do buy one, please let us know how well it works out.

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