I am using an old Toshiba Portege 7200 laptop which has the slim floppy
drive in the docking station and it runs WinXP.
This laptop has a P3 CPU/128MB RAM/64GB PATA IDE SSD. Never had issues
with it reading/writing floppy disks.
I especially kept it for work with floppy disks and parallel port
communication.
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On 16/03/2025 20:10, Ed Marciniak via groups.io wrote:
Your PC must support 256 and 512 byte sectors and the number of sectors
per track used by LIF formats to successfully read/write disks. “Super
IO” chips that implement PS2 keyboard/mouse, IDE, a parallel and one or
two serial ports plus a floppy interfaces should have no problem(usually
80486 and earlier Pentium). Somewhat newer systems that had the parallel
port and floppy, serial/parallel/keyboard via the LPC interface also
usually have no trouble(late 486 or earlier Pentium to later pentium
maybe P2/P3 typically). Anything Pentium 4, core, core2 and newer you’re
probably going to be out of luck. There might be some exceptions, like
certain servers that had an LPC interface for a parallel port (for
license dongles) that also happen to retain a floppy interface.
In principle, a USB device could support non DOS formats but most likely
do not. There are some specialized hardware out there .. flux something
or another intended to read raw media that could do the job via USB.
Something like an old D630, or more generally D600 to D630 and D800 to
D830 that can have a floppy, CD-R, DVD or battery in a hot swap bay
that’ll do it as well.
