Floppy access under Hyper-V (v1 machine)

[Terry McConnell]

One of the quirks of Hyper-V is that it does not support the virtual floppy format (.img) used by everybody else. Typical microsoft. You need to first create a virtual floppy in .vfd format. Windows has tools for this, but if you have an existing one lying around  you can just make a copy. Then it is easy to attach it to your VM under its settings tab by clicking on the floppy controller icon, which allows you to browse for the .vfd you want to attach.

Minix 3 doesn't seem to like raw .vfd files, so you should low-level format the virtual floppy file in some other OS. My minix 3 is in a multiboot setup along with FreeBSD so I first booted there and did

$ sudo fdformat /dev/fd0

Back in minix 3 I did

# mkfs.mfs -B 4096 -b 360 /dev/fd0

Then I was able to mount /dev/fd0 with no problems.

[Peter Shkenev]

Hello Terry,

Seems like your floppy has Minix FS right now. Linux maybe will be able
to read this, but Windows certainly won't.

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Best regards,
Peter