# Brother 9 needle floppy replacement



## Brian (May 18, 2007)

I have a Brother BES 916AC embroidery machine. Recently the 3.5 floppy reader started acting up. When it reads from the floppy disk it would leave out some of the file information.
(If the file had 9 colours it would show only 4) Sometimes it would not read the file at all (read error). I recently bought a USB simulating floppy drive from a company that was recommended by a Brother Rep. This unit will not recognise any of my files(.bdf) which were created using the Brother BES 100 digitising software which came with my machine and which is the digitising software I have used for the last 20 years. We(the company rep & I) have tried various resetting combinations of the pins in this unit but without success. It will read a DST file. I have tried saving my files in a TAJIMA format but it does'nt work.
Can anyone suggest any other solutions?
Sorry for the long post.


----------



## binki (Jul 16, 2006)

Can't you just replace the floppy drive?


----------



## Brian (May 18, 2007)

That was my first thought. Was told by the tech from the company that sold me the replacement that replacing the floppy would not work.Something to do with the format that brother used being different from the format that regular floppys use.


----------



## Brian (May 18, 2007)

I have seen a post for converting Melco EMT10T machines and they have to download a file to their USB sticks and then use this file to activate the USB emulator. Does anyone know if a similar procedure is required for the Brother machine and if so where this file can be found?


----------



## LTPEMB (Jul 10, 2015)

BDF files are actually not native format for the machine, I didn't even know you could load bdf directly *might have to try that*. While i have Brother machines as well I always export to .dst If the BDF files don't work anymore but they use to with floppy drives it probably has somthing to do with architecture of floppys and how the machine would read bdf off the floppy discs and that while the USB emulator works to replicate storage when you save a file onto the usb it may not copy it over the same way. If .dst works export to .dst on the usb as it saves a great deal of space and processing for the machine anyways. BDF is an outline file with extra data that the machine doesn't even use so there really isn't a need. 

*(If you are using a flash drive that came with the emulator than do NOT do this)* but if you are using your own flash drive, with a spare flash drive (hopefully 4 GB or less) plug in your flash drive, right click the flash drive and click on "Format" Go to the drop down menu and click "FAT" and assign an allocation of 8192 bytes. If the Drive has a navigator buttons or output you may need to create a selectable folder that the emulator can open and emulate than load the file as if you were loading it from a floppy. 

You also may have to change your machine loading settings as there are usually 3 or 4 different loading priority methods and then 2 or 3 loading settings that control when it opens the file and how the file runs. The best bet is set to on machine memory as priority. Then Load files from the emulator onto the memory. That leaves it up to the machine at that point.


----------

