And … it works! I did have some hard thoughts about whoever decided that a flat battery should prevent Windows booting, mind you!Īnyway it boots up in Windows 98. I go in, and, acting on instinct, set the date and time and invite it to continue. This too refuses to boot, but – more helpfully – offers to take me into Setup, for the BIOS. The internal CMOS battery is long flat, it seems. The oldest machine is a Compaq – remember them? But this refuses to boot, complaining about the date and time. Surely the older ones would have a built-in floppy drive? A twenty-year old Dell Inspiron 7500 peeks out from under a monitor. However I still have all the laptops that I have ever bought, since I started freelancing in 1997. There are various workarounds, such as this one. Apparently it often does not work with Windows 10, thanks to an attempt by Microsoft to drop support for it. This is shoddy work by somebody, and needs to be fixed.Īt least the floppy drive does work with Windows 7. So it supposes that the 720k disk is not formatted. The TEAC FD-05PUB driver is badly written and only understands the latter format. The reason seems to be that the floppy was an original 3.5″ 720kb unit, while later 3.5″ drives were formatted for 1.44 mb. Obviously it could not read the disk, so no good.Īt this end of the game, I think I understand why. But when I inserted the first floppy, Windows told me that the floppy needed to be formatted. This seems to be the one USB floppy drive available under various names. My first instinct was to use my travelling laptop, which runs Windows 7, and a USB external floppy drive which is branded as Dell but seems to be display the label TEAC FD-05PUB in Devices and Printers.

But it was possible that some contained files and photographs of a deceased relative, which should be preserved.

Most of them were plainly software, of no special relevance. Yesterday I inherited a couple of cases of old 3.5″ floppy disks.

How to format floppy disk windows 10