I'm trying to breathe new life into an old external 3.5" floppy drive that came with a Dell Latitude LM (1997). The drive connects through the parallel printer port. How would I go about running this device on a new Dell Dimension 8400 running Windows XP? Do drivers for such a thing even exist with the dominance of today's USB 2 drives?

Did you try connecting it & see if XP recognizes it, sets it up & install drivers, much like it would do with an older printer? Asus A7N8X-X 1800+ @8x210mhz 512mb PC3200 Ti4200/8X 128mb WDC 60GB

Yeah, no such luck - Windows won't even recognize the presence of any kind of device when I attach it.

Even though it connects to the printer port, most of these floppy drives for laptops do not use the standard parallel port connetion.

you can change the standard connection for the parallel port in the rom based setup at startup but this won't be necessary normally. It is normal that windows doesn't detect any device when you plug it in parallel or serial isn't usb on so not self detecting. Did you ever see windows say that he sees a printer when you plug him in into the parallel port (not usb!), no you have to search for the printer. Now how can we solve this problem since we don't have a wizard to search for a floppy drive. The solution is to update the driver of the parallel port that probably stands on ECP printer port with the driver for your floppy drive. Otherwise search for parallel to usb connectors , i haven't found them.. Greetings Kevin

Hi, Look towards a USB external floppy disk drive powered through the USB bus. Simple quick and around £15 to £20. Leave it permanently connected Dell wanted £30 plus to factory fit an internal floppy drive in my new Dimension D4700. The drives cost around £6 from a computer store. What I couldn't get however was a mounting kit to fit the case though. Only comes with the £30+ drive. USB floppy disk drive works fine and is bootable. Ceri

After more extensive Googling, I'd say I'm out of luck. I also tried switching the LPT port mode in the system BIOS but still nothing. Looks like I'll have to go USB after all. Thanks for the replies!