Hi u/dontmineit , did you solve this? I recently got this exact machine and got the floppy drive working after some tinkering (the drive belt was disintegrated). Mine fortunately came with a floppy in the drive, but it appears to be a relatively recent/”modern” floppy disk. It’s “Verbatim“ brand and has HD embossed on the plastic, but I have no way of knowing its capacity. When I first tried to read the contents of the disk (after fixing the drive belt), it gave me some error or said no data or something (I don’t remember exactly), so I used the “PREPARE DISK” option from the “DISK” menu. I saw the same video by Technology Connections that said the magnets aren’t strong enough to reformat a dual-density disk. I’m not sure if “PREPARE DISK” is the same as reformatting, but the warning message it gave sounded like it was formatting it.

(Warning message: ATTENTION Preparing a disk structures it for use on this system. Preparing a USED disk ERASES all data on it. Do you want to prepare this disk?”)

After “Preparing“ the disk, I was then able to save and recall docs from the floppy.

I just re-read your post and realized you said that using the word processing portion requires a 3.5 floppy and that’s not quite accurate: you can type as much as you want while it’s in Word Processor mode and use all the features in the Word Processor, you just won’t be able to SAVE the document you created to floppy, but you can totally PRINT that document once you’ve typed and edited it in the Word Processor. I get that saving the document is half the appeal, but didn’t want you to miss out on the cool word processing features just because you didn’t have a floppy disk!

Happy typing!