Presentation of USB floppy to a VM

[JulietDeltaGolf]

Ok, bit of a pet project I won't bore you with the details of but:

I have a USB floppy drive attached to my Windows 10 PC, where it appears to the OS as a floppy drive and works fine as such at the host level.

I have a VM am running PC-DOS, hosted on VMware Workstation 12.5.

What I would like to do is present the USB floppy to the VM so it appears as the A: (or B:) drive, so I can format 720kb physical floppies.

I don't seem to be able to do this - If I attempt to present a floppy drive VMware just says 'no floppy hardware present'. I can present the USB floppy to the VM as a USB device but would you believe that out of the box PC-DOS doesn't support USB, what a shocker.....

Any ideas how I can get the USB floppy presented to any VM as a floppy device and not a USB device please?

I know I can present floppy .imgs to the VM and this works fine but that is not the goal here - I need to work with physical 720K floppies!

Cheers.

[RDPetruska]

Odd, that *should* work. If the host sees the USB floppy drive as drive A:, you should be able to specify physical drive A: as the floppy drive for the guest.

I've used such a setup in the past with an XP host and a Win7 host, haven't tried Win10.

WinImage (shareware) is able to work with physical disks as well as images, in case you weren't already aware.

[JulietDeltaGolf]

Nevermind - I have worked around this already - Server 2000 is old enough to natively support 720KB floppies but new enough to work with USB devices, problem solved.

More than happy to continue with the original post as an intellectual exercise, otherwise I shall mark this is answered shortly!