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Needed a copy of Backpack 5.25 Parellel port floppy driver

I don't think that NT4/XP/2K drivers ever existed for the floppy drives. I can check on the CD that I have with Backpack drivers, but ISTR that floppy drives for the NT-series of operating systems weren't included. If you can even find the 3.5" BP parallel port driver for NT+, it will work on the 5.25" unit.
 
The last backpack floppy driver (BPDD213) released does not support XP (or Win 2000 or Win Me). That has a BACKUP.SYS dated 1997 with setup files from 2002.

I think there was a brief attempt at NT drivers but those did not work and were pulled from the market. But that is hazy memory of a press release from about 20 years ago.
 
Well, FWIW, I wrote and posted the details of how the backpack works, together with a file that actually does it on DOS. Somewhere, I wrote a VxD for Win9x that does the same. It should be possible to do the same on NT/XP/2K using as a model, the QIC170 driver in the DDK.
 
Well, there are plans for a versatile (e.g. will work with some of the old parallel-port MCU programmers) parallel interface here, including some using the V-USB interface. But the last one using the AT90USB168 is the fastest and probably the simplest.
 
Even a USB-to-parallel adaptor will not bypass the need for appropriate drivers.

These backpack parallel floppy units worked fine in DOS, Windows 95 and Windows 98. Maybe even on Windows ME (Since that is just a customized Win98), but i doubt you can get it working on Win2K, WinXP, Win NT and so on.
 
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Thought that was pretty clear right from the start. But if you're up to it, you could certainly "roll your own", particularly with a USB connection. OTOH, if you don't have any experience writing NT device drivers, that could be a pretty steep learning curve.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Thought that was pretty clear right from the start. But if you're up to it, you could certainly "roll your own", particularly with a USB connection. OTOH, if you don't have any experience writing NT device drivers, that could be a pretty steep learning curve.
Click to expand...


Maybe you could offer to program the drivers for a small compensation...Like a fully serviced Cray-2... :p


Ah i also like these serial floppy drives, so nostalgic. But i guess the easy workaround is to set up a 10 dollar laptop from the fleamarket with Windows 95 or DOS... Then the drive AND the computer are portable XD Or just put a normal 5.25 Floppy into the desktop...
 
Been in the NT/2K/XP kernel-mode driver area. Get ready for lots of typing as in functions named " ExInterlockedInsertTailList" or "MmGetSystemAddressForMdl". Much more involved than your usual MSDOS or Win9x device drivers. Semaphores, mutexes, memory pools, oh yeah.

On the other hand, using a simple USB driver to communicate with the USB-parallel adapter described above and leaving the details in user-mode code might not be too bad.
 
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