If you ever happen to find a very old Windows game and want to install it on your recent Windows XP machine, you might run into the floppy drive problem. Would either be that your floppy drive is not working anymore or because you plainly don't have one to begin with, this little trick will allow you to create a virtual drive recongnized by Windows without the need of complicated programs such a Deamon Tools or any other related program. This little trick comes from early DOS days, and is surpinsingly still effective today.

Search in your startup list for the command prompt program. The program prompt is what is left of the old DOS platform that old Windows instances (up to Win 98) used as the boot program before running themselves. When you use that program, you'll be prompted to a familiar (or not) c:\ prompt. The command prompt is not a real DOS platform in Windows XP, but it is close enough and will do just fine for what we need to do.

You do not need to switch directory before entering the command, or doing anything else either. At this point, just type:

SUBST [name of drive you want to create] [source folder]

-=> Example: SUBST B: C:\games\gameinst


Once this is done, the newly and virtually created drive will be accessible like any other drive in your system, and be recongnized by the install program as a real drive. In practice, it IS a real drive, but all the info of the new "floppy" drive will be taken directly from the source folder you used as the substitution instead of a real floppy, fooling the program.

To get to the new drive, type the letter of the drive you created followed by a :. Which would probably be either A: or B:. Once you are there, you can see the files with the DIR command (dir /w/p command might be usefull here). However, if you already know the name of the file you need to run to launch the install sequence (more often than not install.exe), you don't need to bother yourself searching for it. Remember, the newly created drive is the exact copy of the source folder. This mean that you can keep a window of the source folder open and take the name of the file from there instead.

Have fun! :)