DOS/Windows guest operating systems and USB floppy

[CookyMonzta]

If I were to use a USB floppy drive, is there any additional procedure required to configure MS/PC-DOS or Windows 3.1/95/98/ME to recognize it as Drive A?

Or is it as simple as configuring the guest OS to recognize a USB device (most likely, set to version 1.1) and then plugging in the floppy, and the guest OS will automatically recognize it as a floppy, with the possible exception that it must be set as drive A?

[RDPetruska]

Actually, as long as your host sees the USB device as a floppy drive, just assign it to the guest VM's configuration floppy drive (don't use auto-detect, specify the USB floppy drive).

[WoodyZ]

Just an FYI...  You will not be able to boot directly from the USB Drive although you might be able to with the use of a third party utility, Plop Boot Manager 5.0.  You can also use virtual floppy images if you need to boot directly from Floppy.  On a Windows Host you can use WinImage to create floppy images on the Host from the USB (or internal) Floppy.  On Linux Host you can use dd.

Also IIRC in order to get the USB Floppy to be assigned A: you'll need to disable the Floppy in the Virtual Machine's BIOS.

[Computer5000]

I have a Sony USB Floppy Drive attached to my host machine and it works no problem, but when I add it to my DOS 6.22 VM, the only option is auto detect, and it doesn't show up in the guest. 

Win 8.1 64bit Pro

Vmware Workstation 10.0.7

[continuum]

Check your vmx-file.
Try

floppy0.present = "true"
floppy0.startConnected = "true"

floppy0.autodetect = "false"
floppy0.fileName = "A:"
floppy0.fileType = "device"

[Computer5000]

A step in the right direction!  I can access the floppy drive in my guest machine, but now when I take out the floppy disk and insert a different one, the first one with all it's files show's up.  It some how stores the first disk I put into it into some cache.

Thanks

[screege]

This was working for me 2 days ago, I need win98 to recognize my usb floppy running win10 and vmware 12.5, I putted the values for the floppy and it was working fine untill today I now get an error that says:

cannot connect the virtual device floppy0 because no corresponding device is available on the host.

Do you want to try to connnect this virtual device every time you power on the virtual machine?