# formatting floppy drives (not quite what it says)



## vwtriker (Oct 27, 2014)

I am trying to format some old floppy drives, my pc does not have a floppy disc drive installed to the motherboard bit i am using a usb drive. I know that there are files on the disc and that they are in FAT12 format. I just can't get them to format, i have used kill disk, that does not even see the A drive. Winimage does see the drive but refuses to carry out the format.

I am trying to install dos5 just for old times sake, pointless i know as i will never use it in earnest lol. It's now become a challenge really


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## cwwozniak (Nov 29, 2005)

Hi vwtriker, and welcome to TSG.

I am not clear on what you are trying to do. You can not format a floppy disk drive, but you can format a floppy disk in in the drive. When you format a floppy disk, you delete all of the content that was saved on the disk.

If you want to read the contents of the floppy disk, may need drivers that match both the brand and specific model number of the USB drive as well your current operating system. If it is a very old drive, there is a good chance that drivers may not be available to work beyond Windows XP.

Are you trying to boot up the computer from a floppy disk inserted in a connected USB based floppy drive?


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## foxidrive (Oct 20, 2012)

vwtriker said:


> I just can't get them to format, i have used kill disk, that does not even see the A drive. Winimage does see the drive but refuses to carry out the format.


It would help to know what error message you received.

Windows has a format command which will format floppy disks.


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## DaveBurnett (Nov 11, 2002)

I installed DOS5 (a while ago) and If I remember rightly I did it without floppy drives and by just unpacking the files to the disk. 
With DOS you configured the system from DOS after you had installed it.


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## foxidrive (Oct 20, 2012)

You will need to sys the disk from a bootable media to make it bootable, such as

```
sys a: c:
```
after booting from a: to make c: bootable.


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## DaveBurnett (Nov 11, 2002)

Or from the OS you happen to be running (like Windows in my case) when you format the disk.

Format D: /S 

transfers the system files


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## vwtriker (Oct 27, 2014)

A bit slow in getting back but here goes.
Installing Dos6.22 is all but impossibles with out expanding the files and copying them to the hard drive, well it was for me.
I got myself a usb floppy drive, made the bootable disk 1 and then disk 2&3. That was the hard part really, a big problem for me was that the floppies i have are years old and many of them had faults.

Once Dos was installed windows 3.11 was really easy, this will install by copying the in stall file to a partitioned drive and running setup from there, quite literally to 30 secs to install, I then went on to install Norton Utilities 8 and Xtreegold.

I do have one small problem and that's a CD drive that is not seen. I know its the way i have edited the autoexec.bat and config sys.

I am using an IBM driver mscdex.exe and ibmtpcd.sys files though i have no idea what make the cd drive is.
the line in the auto.bat file is.........c:\cddriver\mscdex.exe/k:001
the line in the config.sys is...........c:\cddriver\ibmtpcd.sys/k:001

But i cannot see the cd drive in Dos......any ideas ??

Oh if anyone wants a better description on what i have done so far drop me a msg.

I have two cd drives, one a reader the other a writer.


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