Rescuing old 3.5" floppy disc data on 64-bit Windows 7

Trying to rescue a bunch of old Infocom text adventures. Bought a 3.5" USB drive which is perfectly recognised by my Windows 7 64 bit Home Premium OS. Unfortunately, system can read the disc but comes up with message saying that the win32 files are not compatible with my 64-bit OS. Are there any workarounds folk can tell me? Is partitioning the disc an option? Or are there programs out there which can translate the 32-bit software into a compatible form? I'd hate to lose access to these "Treasures of Infocom I and II" which have some of the most creative, wackiest problems to solve (Zork etc. ). Any help most welcome.

 

You could create a small FAT32 partition at the end of the drive, or even easier try copying them to a FAT32 flash drive. Let us know if you hit problems as I have similar gear and some old floppies around somewhere and could try it myself.

 

You get this error when copying the files from the floppy?
It is usually a runtime error.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/243718/run_dos_programs_in_windows_7.html
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/12771/play-your-favorite-dos-games-in-xp-vista-and-windows-7/

 

Thanks Foogoo...at least some partial success. Bottom link u gave led me to d/l an app called D-Fend Reloaded. Removed the hassle of trying to "mount" drives using DosBox (which I never managed to do) and I now have about 50% of the games working. Why the others aren't is still a mystery.. I've a feeling things like ansi.sys/config.sys issues may be involved but have forgotten anything I ever knew about fixing those :-D

 

Can you copy the contents from the floppy disks and same them as *.img files? If so, you can then mount the *.img files in a Virtual Floppy Disk Drive.

Quote from the link: "A virtual floppy drive that mounts image files (*.img) as new browseable computer resources. You can mount a floppy image file as a virtual floppy drive and directly access the contents view, edit, rename, delete or create files on a virtual floppy, format a virtual floppy, launch a program on a virtual floppy... Almost anything you can do with a real floppy. Tested from WinXP (32bit) to Win7 (64bit). Portable, open-source & free."

http://www.windows7download.com/win7-simplified-virtual-floppy-drive-vfd-/bmgcclqh.html

When the floppy disks no longer work, you'll have their contents saved as *.img files.

 

Interesting!

I'm running Windows XP Professional SP3 & Windows 7 Ultimate on a 80 GB IDE HDD.