We had to use a 3.5” floppy!

Just when I though I would never have to see / use a floppy disc again, we had to install a piece of older software that originally come on floppy discs purchased about ten years ago.

We were able to get a CD to replace the 8 floppy discs, but the license information was still stored on one of the floppy discs. The installer from the CD asked at the end of the installation to insert the disc into drive “A:” and hit okay. The only problem is the computer did not have a floppy disc drive.

My first thought was “this will be easy” – we will just make make an ISO file with the software on it and mount it as an image.

It ended up being a bit harder than that- as you cannot mount to drive letter A since it is reserved.

I then had to go into the registry to HKLM\System\Mounted Devices and look for “\DOSDevices\A:” and rename the “A:” to a different drive letter to free up a letter “A:” to me mounted.

I then realized that a floppy cannot be an ISO – and I would need to find some sort of floppy emulator as well as piece of software to turn the floppy into a floppy image file.

We ended up finding WinImage to create the floppy image – and used Virtual Floppy Drive to mount the image. We were then able to run through the install CD from start to finish with out actually having a physical floppy drive with the license information on it.