Virtual Floppy Drive (VFD) is very neat program that creates virtual floppy drives, which works just as if they where physical. You can save these virtual floppies in .flp format and use directly in VMware and MS hypervisors, or other programs which support floppy images. They can also be written to physical floppy disks using fx. WinImage.

There is one thing missing in VFD, but you can always press this link while you do step 8 below if you are a bit nostalgic :)

For starters you need to download the following:

FREESCO 0.4.0 – Download
Virtual Floppy Drive 2.1 (VFD) - Download

I’ll describe how to use FREESCO in a virtual environment, that’s why this guide uses FREESCO as an example. You could use whatever floppy based program you wanted to make a virtual floppy for. To see the FREESCO guide click: FREESCO routing in an virtual environment

1. Start by extracting Virtual Floppy Drive into c:\temp\vfd (or another folder, I use c:\temp\ in the guide), and FREESCO into c:\temp\freesco

2. Run vfdwin.exe from where you extracted the files to in step 1.

3. Go to the “Driver” tab and press “Start”. This will install and start the VFD driver.

   

4. Go to the “Drive0” tab and press “Open/Create”.
   

5. Press the “Browse” button and type in the full path to a new .flp file. fx. C:\temp\freesco.flp (or some other path you have write permission to) and press “Open”. You should then see something similar to the picture  below. Make sure that “File” is selected and that media type is “3.5 1.44MB”. Then press “Create”.
   

6. Press “Change” at the “Drive Letter” option, and configure the screen as below.
   

7. You should now be able to access A: drive through your file manager of choice. Check to see if you can access the drive.

8. Start a CMD prompt and browse to where you extracted FREESCO files in step1, and run make_fd.bat. Just press enter when you see the following screen:
   

9. Go back info VFD Control Panel (vfdwin.exe it you closed it) and on the “Drive0” tab press “Close”. If it asks if you want to save changes to the file, answer “Yes” and chose to overwrite the file and press save.

You now have a floppy file which can be used directly in VMware environments. Save this file as your master, and make copies whenever you need a new FREESCO machine. If you boot directly from the file just created, you will get an installation forced down on the floppy, and you have to follow all the above steps again.

The above method can be used for all utilities that make use of floppy disks. http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm is a good place to look if you are missing old boot disks for Win 98, NT4, 2000 and so on. Typically they come in .exe format and require you to have a floppy drive, but you can work around that with the above method.