An alternative is to use a floppy disk hardware emulator, a device which appears to be a standard floppy drive to the old equipment by interfacing directly to the floppy disk controller, while storing data in another medium such as a USB thumb drive, Secure Digital card, or a shared drive on a computer network. Floppy disks themselves are fragile, or may need to be replaced often. įloppy disks and floppy drives are gradually going out of production, and replacement of malfunctioning drives, and the systems hosting them, is becoming increasingly difficult. Proper operation may require operating system, software and data to be read and written from and to floppies, forcing users to maintain floppy drives on supporting systems. Older equipment may be difficult to replace or upgrade because of cost, requirement for continuous availability or unavailable upgrades. (Much quicker formatting can be achieved using the emulator software below on your Windows computer).Ĭomplete instructions for using software and images are available here.Older models of computers, electronic keyboards and industrial automation often used floppy disk drives for data transfer. Once the stick is formatted you can use it just as if it was a stack of blank floppies. After it reaches 999, it will go back to 0 and stay there. Once you see that it is counting up, you can release the buttons. As the emulator initializes it displays a series of numbers, then, if the buttons are still held down, it begins counting up to 999. If you need to format a new thumb drive, it can be formatted in the emulator by depressing both buttons on the emulator's face while powering it up. Don't reformat it, because you may need to use one of the hard drive setup disks. The USB stick that came with your emulator is ready to use. A label attached to the stick identifies the different setup disks. Disks 8 - 13 are system disks, and disk 14 is an update disk for the various execs. Disks 1 - 7 are formatted as a hard drive setup disks, which can be used to reformat a failed hard drive. The emulator is shipped with a thumb drive that's already formatted for use.ĭisk 0 in the virtual stack is blank floppy, ready for use as backup. Selecting a different number on the display is exactly the same, from the CNC’s point of view, as removing one disk and inserting another. Pressing both buttons at once increments the 100’s digit. The right button increments the 1's digit of the display, and the left button increments the 10's digit. The emulator treats a properly formatted thumb drive as a 'stack' of 1.44MB floppy disks, which you can select via the two buttons on the face of the unit.

Floppy disk emulator software