HELP !
Basically, the title says it all.
I have 3 Jurassic Floppy Install disks, but the new computer at work doesn’t have a floppy bay!
I need to “string” all 3 floppies together onto a cd so I can install the ancient program into the new 'puter
I know there are programs that do this, but I’m coming up blank with searches like “floppy to cd” or floppy conversion to cd" in download.com
Can anyone point me in the right direction?
your stuck unless you have a floppy at home. I’ll assume you do.
do you have a USB keychain drive? Dump the files on that. to transfer to your work computer.
or
email them to yourself. your only talkin 4 megs. Most .mpeg files people pass around these days are over 5 megs.
I don’t think there’s any such application as you’re looking for. The installation of any software differs vastly and depends on the installation application being used.
There are some things you could try though.
Try just creating three directories on the CD named;
Disk 1
Disk 2
Disk 3
and copy the floppy contents into each. Then run the installation from the first directory. Some installation programs are smart enough to work the rest out themselves. Failing that it may let you point it in the right direction when it asks for Disk 2.
Or… if the files on the disks all have different names you could try just bunging it all into the one directory.
Failing that, there’s other things you could try, like editing the locations of files on any installation script in Disk 1, but that very much depends on the installation app being used and isn’t so easy.
Also worth keeping in mind that some installation disks were deliberately designed to make any of the above impossible, to prevent piracy.
Do PCs (I"m assuming you’re on a PC) have, and use, diskimages?
On the Mac, we have diskimages which are files that, when doubleclicked, mount as if you’d attached a drive or popped in a floppy. The OS sees them as separate volumes. (The “classic” universe of System 7 through MacOS 9 used “.img” files; the modern world of MacOS X uses “.dmg” files).
I know on the PC there are “.iso” files that are diskimage files of CDs. Don’t know if one makes an “.iso” of a floppy or not, or whether you can mount (or load? whatever PC terminology would be…) them so that the OS thinks it has a drive (or drives, plural) and that you’ve inserted a diskette (s), but if you can, it’s a convenient solution.
How about just burning 3 separate CDs and swapping as prompted. I can get 50 CDRs for about $10.
No, not natively. There are programs that can mount an ISO image, as you pointed out, but in my experience they’re highly flakey.
I don’t understand, actually, why this never caught on in the Windows world. Disk images are probably the handiest thing I can think of that the Mac uses ubiqiutously, but Windows never “adopted.”
As for the OP, a lot of software of that era was copy protected, so you might not be able to do it at all. Your best bet without buying a floppy drive is the smallest USB flash drive you can get, formatted FAT16 if you can get away with it.
If the PC has the space for it, though, I’d suggest to you that internal floppy DRIVES are cheaper than many boxes of floppy disks (around $7-$8). Just buy one and slap it in – it’s easy, and the PC almost certainly has the connectors inside.
The death of the floppy can’t come soon enough for me, and I haven’t used one in years, but it’s a little silly not to have the drive if you’re actually still using them.
An external USB floppy drive might be simpler. Since it’s a work computer, I’m assuming that he can’t just open the case and add a floppy drive. Now an external floppy drive might cost $30 and perhaps that’s more than you want to spend, but perhaps you can borrow one from a notebook system. At my work, we use a Dell Latitude notebook system’s USB floppy drive on Dell Optiplex desktop systems that didn’t come with floppy drives.