Windows 10: FAT 12 suport

Hello, all
We have an usb device that exposes FAT12 table.as USB storage device with 2MB size.
The device is correctly appear in all previous versions of Windows.
We have limited requwerements / options for this device. Form the WIndows we need
- view name is the single file on the USB drive
- delete this file
- copy new file.

Starting with Windows 10 (tested on enterprise) we have a problem with our device:
- the device is reported as not formatted with size 0

In disk management utility the device appears as Removable 2 MB Online unallocated

How can we solve this problem on Windows 10 side (the device FW upgrading e.g., to FAT 32 is not a solution for us)

RGRDS, Alex Gornik

:)

 

iPhone v Smartphone - wotsay?

I'm not THAT fat .. OK, I may have put on a couple of pounds over xmas but ..

 

new memory card has messed my n95 up...

Must remeber that your NOKI N95 suported max 2 GB cards. if you want more you must upgrade phone software to 12.

 

Fat12 has not been used since the dark ages of old school floppy drives. Of course Windows 10 is no longer going to know how to access that archaic FAT, because it no longer is used or exists in modern day computing. Even Linux or any Simulated OS or DOS would never understand that Caveman tech.

 

As an experiment, I dusted off my old external USB floppy drive. I don't recall when I last used it.

Works fine with a 3.5" HD (1.44MB) floppy under Win 10 X64. I expect a floppy to be FAT12, but I'm not sure how to check that. (The sector size is given as 512 bytes, which is the same as for FAT12.)

I looked at reformatting the floppy. It would reformat to "FAT". I don't know which flavor of FAT that would produce. I hope that it would be backwards compatible with older versions of Windows.

This isn't absolute proof that Windows 10 supports FAT12, but I believe that it does. That would make your problems something more subtle. Sorry that I can't be more helpful.

 

My understanding was that FAT12 was supported only for Floppy drives and that was the only option on these drives. I have never heard of a Windows floppy being anything other than FAT12. When formatting a floppy drive "FAT" implies FAT12. It appears that FAT12 was supported for other devices as well. But it is a fact of life that newer operating systems drop support for old and obsolete technology. It wouldn't surprise me that Windows 10 has dropped support for the device in question. FAT12 on floppy drives continue to be supported - for now.

 

When wanting to change formats of disks I use the free bootable GPARTED LiveCD. With a floppy I'd have it plugged in before booting to the CD. GPARTED can work with a number of different formatting types.

The last couple of times I used the program was to format External USB HDDs as FAT32, one at 120GB and the other at 250GB, useful when working with MacOS X and Windows and interchanging files. Windows formatting has a partition/drive size limit of 32GB for FAT32 which didn't accomplish what I needed.

 

Perhaps you can make your device emulate a Floppy then ? so Fat12 is seen

Perhaps change the partition Type to Fat 12 ( 0x01) , if not already, and see if it is seen in win10 ? MiniTool Partition Wizard can do that .

KB.

 

I did a little digging tonight. It appears that the Raspberry Pi/SBC (Small Board Computer) users creating units to read old school floppy's.

 

Because of the limitation for Floppies, they used 12-bit addressing, todays machines are too fast, so you have to "Home Brew" a project to read them.

It makes you wonder if someone could actually figure out how to read information off of the old school Apollo Read Only Rope memory or put together a Platter unit to feed into say a Pi as the controller to allow you to read and write data on one of those beasts.

 

Hello, all
Thanks about the answers.
I will analyze all your answers and will inform about the status.
In any case we need to find the solution for curent devices that are on the field. We use FAT12 presentaion to load new FW on these devices.
In next generation of our devices we will implement new mechanism of the device firmware upgrading
RGRDS, Alex
RGRDS, Alex

 

That is what we are here for. A lot of us are old Home Brew users who were around 10-12 when people started building home computers. There are also some who go back even farther. Now if you are daring, you could probably use a PI and breadboard a setup to read and write to the floppy, along with verifying by using Python. DRDos is the only OS that I can think of that is still used for Firmware images.

You always have this option. The Computer History Museum tries to keep older systems running and also have had to basically rebuild from scratch on some systems, by using the old schematics. If nothing else works, hit them up at computerhistory.org. Some of those that are volunteers, are so old, they sailed when Admiral Rickover created the first Nuke powered Sub.

 

There was a way to use FreeDos and it's fdboot.img , to make a USB key be "seen as a Floppy" but it has been years since I played with that but I am sure there are other ways to do something similar, if win10 needs to see a Floppy.

FreeDOS | Download FreeDOS (last item on page)

found a post about using fdboot.img too:

at least with my netbook (an Acer Aspire), the trick is to make the MBR (master boot record) look enough like that of a floppy drive to fool the BIOS into treating it as USB-FDD. I was able to accomplish that by downloading fdboot.img from http://www.freedos.org/, and "burning" it onto the USB stick using dd if=~/downloads/fdboot.img of=/dev/sdc (make absolutely sure you use the right device node for your USB stick: don't overwrite your hard drive MBR!)
after that, I rebooted with the USB drive inserted and this time it was recognized as a USB-FDD instead of USB-HDD.and from Linux, I could mount the USB stick using mount /dev/sdc /mnt, and copy files onto it.




EDIT: Okay this got me thinking and if you use the fdboot.img image (above) and use Rufus USB Creator to "burn" a DD Image with it, it turns the USB Key into a Fat12 Partitioned USB Key , hope my 16GB Key is Ok *Smile it's only 2mb now.... Have not booted off it as I have a backup running ATM though, it is accessible in File Explorer, not sure how much free space you need for your Firmware.

 

I guess I could fall into a small portion of that type museum, have an 80386-33MHz, 80386-40MHz [year newer than my first in '92, an 80486-25OD75 [25MHz Over Drive to 75MHz], all with MS-DOS 6 and 6.22, Windows 3.11 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11, an 80386-16MHz Laptop with MS-DOS 5 and Windows 3.1. They all work but the first 3 have bad CMOS batteries, just have to reset the BIOS at bootup. And I've kept a WinXP computer working along with a Win7, WinVista and the latest.