{"id":6886,"date":"2024-02-13T09:35:36","date_gmt":"2024-02-13T15:35:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.logikalsolutions.com\/wordpress\/?p=6886"},"modified":"2025-06-20T07:21:16","modified_gmt":"2025-06-20T12:21:16","slug":"usb-floppy-drive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.logikalsolutions.com\/wordpress\/information-technology\/usb-floppy-drive\/","title":{"rendered":"Linux and USB Floppy Drives"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Everybody thinks they are dead, but floppy disks are still around and you basically need a USB floppy drive to use them because modern motherboards don’t have a header connection for the ribbon cable internal drives need. I now own two USB floppy drives because I forgot I had an IBM portable floppy drive buried under a bunch of portable DVD R\/W drives behind a bunch of Super Floppies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why this post now? I was cleaning out part of a closet in the parents office and found a slinky of 3.5 inch floppies. Yes, I even found some 5 1\/4 disks, but did not save those. Mom used to use these disks to backup Quicken files. Early versions of Quicken used to offer the option of backing files up onto floppy disks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why Care?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

You should read this interview with the Last Person Standing<\/a> in the floppy disk market. GE has ECG equipment that still uses floppy<\/a>. There are oscilloscopes and wave form generators on the market today that use 3.5 inch floppies as well.<\/p>\n\n\n

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That thing is currently listed at over $2,000. You don’t throw out a perfectly working tool just because it uses floppy disks. No sir, you keep equipment around to maintain your floppy disks. I’m told a lot of air planes and jets still use 3.5 inch floppies to off-load diagnostic information as well as update firmware.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On a more personal note, I still have at least one Sony Mavica floppy disk digital camera that I love.<\/p>\n\n\n

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It actually takes better pictures than any of my phones. If I need good pictures of something for online use, that’s the camera I reach for. Will really suck when the battery won’t take a charge anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A friend from high school has an ex-wife whose mother bought some kind of sewing contraption that uses 3.5 inch floppies to load patterns. There are a lot of those things out there from that era. Got to wonder just how tightly encoded a pattern has to be to fit inside 1.44 MEG and stitch something like this.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Mint Recognizes USB Floppy drive<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

On one machine it instantly mounted and displayed contents of the floppy. Sigh, remember the days when we had to have a different driver for every mouse?<\/p>\n\n\n

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On another machine running a different version of Mint it simply recognized the drive.<\/p>\n\n\n

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I had to click on it to mount and display the contents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You Cannot Format Out of the Box<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Drivers and software for a regular internal floppy drive will not work on a USB floppy drive.<\/p>\n\n\n

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ufiformat must be installed<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

You have to use Synaptic (or whatever) package manager to install ufiformat<\/a>. Don’t be scared by the low version number. This has been rolled into distros for a very long time. I would be shocked if you could find a Linux desktop distro that doesn’t have it in their repos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Find the Floppy Drive<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

If you are a command line person you can <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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