Yea, sure, it's ooooooooooooooold!!!!! Whatever.Īnyway, another issue on top of all that is that MS-DOS 3.3 and later supported 'dynamic' disk formats.

Whatever the reason, it's back in and you can use USB floppy drives on win10 machines.

Turns out Microsoft was planning to get rid of UFI support (or it was broken). I know all of the above because in the windows 10 developer preview people were saying that their USB floppy drives were not working. Those older formats use a /completely/ different scheme (CLV) that the usb drives can't access. You'll run in to the same issue if, say, you wan to access old 800k or 400k disks on a mac with a USB floppy drive. Just block level access to 1.44 meg disks, and nothing else. USB floppy drives aren't capable of low level access. Regular floppy drives are very very very old tech that's very 'low level' - Things like DMF use low level tricks and hacks to squeeze more data out. USB floppy drives use a subset of the USB mass storage spec called 'UFI' UFI was designed to give block level access to 1.44 meg floppy drives, and that's it. USB drives are decades newer tech wise and were only designed to help people transition off of floppy storage, and only designed to work with what was most common at the time. There is no need to close it after the first job as it can function in a loop with as many floppy disks is required.Short answer: USB floppy drives don't operate like 'regular' floppy drives. What Format144 does is write the boot sector and the file allocation table as well as clean the root directory. It immediately detects the floppy drive and initiating the formatting process requires just the pressing of a key, provided that all warning messages have been acknowledged by the user. the application is console-based but thanks to the wizard-driven structure even the least experienced user can carry out the job. In truth, the media still has some life in it and can be used and this is when Format144 comes in. The problem consists in the fact that the operating system verifies only if the floppy disk is readable and if it is not then the actual formatting process is skipped.

In plenty of cases, Windows XP refuses to format this type of storage if it is has become demagnetized or corrupt. Simple purposes require simple tools and Format144 fits this concept perfectly as it has been built to help the user format floppy disks that are deemed unusable.

Formatting floppy disk