5.25" Floppy Disks work with Win98?

[DMc]

Hopefully this is an easy question for many of you.
I'm trying to prove a friend wrong - he says 5.25" floppy disks aren't supported under win98.
This is wrong isn't it?
Surely my other colleague just needs to find the correct driver for his apparently non-plug & play disk drive which he can still use under dos but it's not recognised in win98?
Thanks

[Kel]

It's hard to say if you will ever get a reply on this one.. WHy in the good lords name would one ever even try this? My feeling on it is that as 5.25 disks were at the end of thier shelf life with the advent of 3.1, Microsoft wouldn't have bothered including support for them in '98. However, you can make your DOS devices run fine in Windows if you configure them properly... The question then really is, how can I get Windows 98 to recognize that my 5.25 drive is a viable disk drive?

This one genuinely boggles the mind... <img src=/S/rofl.gif border=0 alt=rofl width=15 height=15>

Hope that helps!

[MikeB]

I agree with the Gifmeister - as usual!. To obtain Win98 on floppies required extra effort as it was normally supplied on cd, so would doubt very nuch that it would be available on 5.25. <img src=/S/yikes.gif border=0 alt=yikes width=15 height=15>

[Andrew Cronnolly]

If you go to the MSDOS prompt and type Format /? you should see that Format /4 allows you to format a 5.25 inch (360kb). At least that is what I see in Windows ME. I would be very surprised if support was removed, but I would be even more surprised if anybody wanted to make any use of such discs.

What about 8" (I think) drives, remember those.

Andrew C

[fburg]

I think you win.

I have a PC that's been upgraded several times. We bought it in 1994-95. Even at that time, 5.25" floppies were no longer standard so we paid extra for it. The upgrades have included a new motherboard (about 2-3 yrs ago), memory, several hard disks, new CD-ROM, new 3.5 floppy drive, and several versions of windows. We have never upgraded the 5.25" disk (it never "broke" since we don't use it a whole lot).

And it still works with Windows 98, which is what we are running now. No new drivers were needed. We still use it on occasion to read 5.25" disks, of which we still have a few. A friend used it about 2-3 months ago for that reason (his PC being too new to have a 5.25" floppy).

Fred

[Granville]

Yes, and I still have a use for them.

Split them open, throw away the disk and peel the inside lining off. Cut into strips 1 to 1.5 inches wide. These are great for cleaning out the platens on dot matrix printers and typewriters.

[Brian Swann]

<hr>WHy in the good lords name would one ever even try this?<hr>

Well Drk, in defence of Davids friend, it's very possible he has some quite important data stored on 5.25 disks. Perhaps data he never thought he'd need again. Certainly back in 3.1 days I temporarily installed a floppy drive for just such a purpose. You never know <img src=/S/shrug.gif border=0 alt=shrug width=39 height=15>

[bobdog]

Yes they do. My first thought when I read this was the same - why do you want to? Then I remembered getting a stack of 5.25 inchers from a new client that had the source code for his primary business system on them. The local retailer gave me a used drive and I hooked it up (without even bolting it in), got the files I needed, and threw the drive away.

Bottom line, it works, if ya gotta.