The Sinclair QL Forum

Hello,

I try to use an external usb floppy with QPC2 under WiNE (Ubuntu ZORIN 9 OS) as flp1_
but it does not work. But it works fine with QPC2 under windows XP.
Is there any solution?

Thanks

Mike

I have always found the USB disk drives very hit and miss - especially with DD disks - have you tried a HD disk?

Remember that Windows XP was the last version to officially support DD disk drives.

For Windows 7, I sometimes find that I have to put a disk in the drive and format it under DOS, and then all of sudden QL formatted DD disks will work with QPC2 - no ideas why. Q-emulator seems to cope better with this.

thanks your reply, but the QPC2 and Qemulato under wine they do not recognize the floppy as device

2 things to check:

On most of my computers the USB floppy in QPC2 for some reason is flp2_ - No idea why.

Does Linux see the USB floppy? If not, you're doomed anyways.

Regards,
Tobias

Linux see and mount the usb floppy I tried as flp2_ no success

If you do a
from the command line, does Explorer see the disk?

Have you added the drive to the list of Wine drives using winecfg?

Tobias

I seems that recognize a media like drive B but I add it with wincgf as /dev/sdc

but nothing flp1_ or flp2_

It might well be that it doesn't work at all (and is not meant to be)....

When I last looked into Wine (admittedly some years ago), file system integration was made in a way that Wine was able to provide mounted file systems to the emulated Windows.

What, in contrast, QPC2 and Q-Emulator want to see would be a raw device. Because the QDOS floppy format is not known to Linux, it would not be able to see a file system it is able to mount, so it cannot hand over to Wine what that would like to see.

There has apparently been some development regarding raw device support in Wine (mainly for USB dangled software and floppy copy protection), but I don't have the slightest idea where we are today.

Norman Dunbar has done some development regarding writing a file system device driver for QDOS floppies for Linux, but I am not sure how far he got.

Regards,
Tobias

Thank you very much Tobias

If it's just about a one time activity transferring files from flp to win, you can use uqlx to do that. uqlx is happily supporting qdos floppies.

Tobias