FAT 12 suport

alexgorn said:

Hello, all
Thanks about the answers.
I will analyze all your answers and will inform about the status.
In any case we need to find the solution for curent devices that are on the field. We use FAT12 presentaion to load new FW on these devices.
In next generation of our devices we will implement new mechanism of the device firmware upgrading
RGRDS, Alex
RGRDS, Alex

There was a way to use FreeDos and it's fdboot.img , to make a USB key be "seen as a Floppy" but it has been years since I played with that but I am sure there are other ways to do something similar, if win10 needs to see a Floppy.

FreeDOS | Download FreeDOS (last item on page)

found a post about using fdboot.img too:

at least with my netbook (an Acer Aspire), the trick is to make the MBR (master boot record) look enough like that of a floppy drive to fool the BIOS into treating it as USB-FDD. I was able to accomplish that by downloading fdboot.img from http://www.freedos.org/, and "burning" it onto the USB stick using dd if=~/downloads/fdboot.img of=/dev/sdc (make absolutely sure you use the right device node for your USB stick: don't overwrite your hard drive MBR!)
after that, I rebooted with the USB drive inserted and this time it was recognized as a USB-FDD instead of USB-HDD.and from Linux, I could mount the USB stick using mount /dev/sdc /mnt, and copy files onto it.




EDIT: Okay this got me thinking and if you use the fdboot.img image (above) and use Rufus USB Creator to "burn" a DD Image with it, it turns the USB Key into a Fat12 Partitioned USB Key , hope my 16GB Key is Ok :) it's only 2mb now.... Have not booted off it as I have a backup running ATM though, it is accessible in File Explorer, not sure how much free space you need for your Firmware.

bro67 said:

The Computer History Museum tries to keep older systems running and also have had to basically rebuild from scratch on some systems, by using the old schematics. If nothing else works, hit them up at computerhistory.org. Some of those that are volunteers, are so old, they sailed when Admiral Rickover created the first Nuke powered Sub.

I guess I could fall into a small portion of that type museum, have an 80386-33MHz, 80386-40MHz [year newer than my first in '92, an 80486-25OD75 [25MHz Over Drive to 75MHz], all with MS-DOS 6 and 6.22, Windows 3.11 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11, an 80386-16MHz Laptop with MS-DOS 5 and Windows 3.1. They all work but the first 3 have bad CMOS batteries, just have to reset the BIOS at bootup. And I've kept a WinXP computer working along with a Win7, WinVista and the latest.

I was able to work with FAT12, directly using Windows Explorer.

• I added an MBR partition of 128 KB using PowerShell (PS) `New-Partition -Size 128KB`. I looked up on the disk MBR using HxD and the size was indeed 128 KB, even though both PS `Get-Partition` says it is 1 MB; `diskpart` did report 128 KB. To format
• I formatted using PS `Format-Volume -FileSystem FAT`. Looking at FAT's MBR on HxD, it was indeed FAT12.

A possible problem is that when I clicked on `Properties` on drive, it said the drive had 1024 KB of used space and 1024 MB of free space.