Usb Floppy Drive For Winxp?

Hi! I want to install a USB floppy drive on a WinXP computer that has no working floppy drive. How do I do this? Can I just buy any USB floppy drive and get it to work? Or do I need to download a driver? If the latter, where can I get the driver? I haven't bought the drive yet.

 

As seen here, XP should just recognize the device and, if necessary, automatically install any necessary drivers. That's because being USB, it should be "Plug and Play".

 

Thank you!

 

Now, of course, you need to keep your fingers crossed that the data on your floppy disks is still viable. Data stored on that type magnetic storage media does not last forever. The magnetic strength of the charged particles degrade, and there is "bleed-over" issues where magnetic charges in one track interferes with adjacent tracks eventually corrupting the data.

Good luck!

 

Thank you for your concern.

 

Any USB drive should work fine. Like was said, it should be plug and play with XP or above.

I just recently purchased a USB floppy drive to recover some word files off some old floppy disks. Some of them are almost 20 years old. Out of 10, only one had an issue being read . . . even it was finally readable the 2nd time I inserted it in the drive. On one of the oldest there was one file that could not be read and I have no idea what kind of file it even is. If they were stored properly, the majority of your floppy disks should be fine.

 

This is smart. While USB sticks/flash drives are more robust (with much greater capacities) than floppies, they are not really intended as long term archival storage devices. They are too easily lost, stepped on, or even zapped by ESD when sliding into and out of pockets. I do not recommend them as backup devices - only temporary storage devices.

 

I actually use flash drives for my work. However, I like floppies and so have a collection of floppies for games and utilities. I especially like to compress files to them. They're useful for smallhttps://cdncache-a.akamaihd.net/items/it/img/arrow-10x10.png hard drives, but modern computers don't hae that issue.

 

I use flash drives all the time too. I am just saying for archival purposes, there are better, more robust options.