Other Virtual floppy drive

Is there any way to create a virtual floppy drive in FreeBSD?

The reason I ask is that I wanted to boot up my old IBM PS/2 Server 85, but I get some beeps and need to boot from a reference diskette to clear them. Unfortunately I can't find my reference diskette among the hundreds of floppies I still have around (what can you do with then?). I did find the reference diskette for my Model 95, but wouldn't even get as far as the BIOS and any beep codes. So, having found and downloaded the required diskette image, I'm not sure how to get it onto a floppy. ISTR IBM provided a program - LDIMAGE.EXE which would do the necessary...but I'm wondering if I can use dd() to copy the image to a virtual floppy just to see how it looks. If it seems OK, I'll have to figure out how to use a floppy drive on FreeBSD :)
 
That IBM PS/2 Server 85 should have a 2.88MB floppy drive. It should be capable of reading "regular" 1.44MB floppies.

The question is, does you mainboard still have a floppy connector? Most new mainboards don't even have one any more. If you have an older mainboard there should be a floppy connector, find the right cable and just hook it up and enable the drive in the BIOS. The FreeBSD fdc(4) will support all 3.5 inch floppy drives (720K [DS/SD], 1.44MB [DS/HD], 2.88MB [DS/ED], etc). It will show up as a regular device as /dev/fd0 for example. Don't confuse these with /dev/fd/0 for example (the latter is a file descriptor; fd(4)).
 
USB floppy drives exist, and I've used them successfully with different variants of Linux (no experience with FreeBSD, though). If you manage to find one, it shouldn't cost more than a couple of euros/dollars.
 
USB floppy drives exist, and I've used them successfully with different variants of Linux (no experience with FreeBSD, though). If you manage to find one, it shouldn't cost more than a couple of euros/dollars.
Actually I do happen to have one but haven't used it with FreeBSD yet.
 
USB floppy drives exist, and I've used them successfully with different variants of Linux (no experience with FreeBSD, though). If you manage to find one, it shouldn't cost more than a couple of euros/dollars.
Please note that common usb floppy drives are usb mass storage devices, and support only a limited number of floppy formats (typically the normal PC ones, like 720k, 1440k, etc).
If you for some reason need your floppy drive to read and / or write a more exotic format, a usb floppy drive is useless - you will need a real floppy drive, and a machine with a real floppy controller and necessary connectors onboard.
 
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