Hello from Kent/London suburbs

[dilwyn]

The SD options for the QL are great. They each have different flavors, one purely emulates the microdrives (vDrive) so the QL won't even know it's there (but you lose speed), and the other (QL-SD) is more integrated and requires a bit of mod on the QL but I believe you gain speed and size of image. There is one in the works that will fit into the ROM socket. But SD cards are just a great substitute for microdrives or disks.

I was able to use a USB floppy on my Windows 7 machine and I believe got Q-Emulator to read the floppies. I think there are also utilities that do that so if you just want to reclaim your stuff and not use the floppy, get yourself a cheap USB floppy.

I've got two USB floppy drives here. Results with both varied on both Windows 10 and 7. One works admirably on all systems, reading DD and HD disks happily and even formatting as long as you explicitly tell it which density to use. The other stubbornly refuses to have anything to do with DD disks, even when explicitly using a FORMAT command from DOS command line to stipulate a DD disk. So the difference is not just down to Windows alone, looks like there are internal reasons, maybe?

[RalfR]

I was able to use a USB floppy on my Windows 7 machine and I believe got Q-Emulator to read the floppies. I think there are also utilities that do that so if you just want to reclaim your stuff and not use the floppy, get yourself a cheap USB floppy.

Same here with success. As long, as you have an USB floppy with NEC chipset, all is ok. I have two others, they are not able to read DD disks.