10 Years Ago Today: Booting From A USB Drive

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I love hitting our 10 Years Ago Today button and finding gems like this. It's hard to believe that it was a decade ago when we discovered how cool it was to boot from a USB drive. :D What the hell were you doing ten years ago today?

Many of the new Intel brand mainboards (and a few other retail brands) have a bootable USB option. This should be commonplace on all mainboards before long. Anyway, I got to wondering what all was needed to boot from one of these Data Traveler devices or if it was even possible. So I copied a Windows 98 boot disk over onto the stick, set the board to boot from USB, and placed it in the USB port as shown.
Click to expand...
 
And yet, it wasn't until Vista and Server 2008 came out where we could add a driver to an install of Windows without having to use a floppy drive. USB flash drive, CDs, even USB floppy drives, weren't even an option to add a driver. That was pathetic.
 
Still have to work on some machines which don't have boot-from-usb options. Yea... I pressure my boss for new PCs when those come through.
 
dgingeri said:
And yet, it wasn't until Vista and Server 2008 came out where we could add a driver to an install of Windows without having to use a floppy drive. USB flash drive, CDs, even USB floppy drives, weren't even an option to add a driver. That was pathetic.
Click to expand...

Not sure what world your living in. I stopped using floppies when I stopped using Win98se (didn't even use them much at that time either). The only reason to need any CD's, DVD's, or USB floppy drives for drivers was for the initial acquisition of them. After that, they got put up and kept for backup. But most of that went away with the ability to download drivers from the manufacturer website. Windows will install drivers for things from slave harddrives or even network drives. Been doin it that way since Win98.

Booting from USB thumbdrives was a cool idea and often allowed for fixing problems. I just wouldn't want it to be a permanent thing. USB is just too slow for it to be satisfying. I have a few thumbdrives around but I rarely have a need for them.
 
prndll said:
Not sure what world your living in. I stopped using floppies when I stopped using Win98se (didn't even use them much at that time either). The only reason to need any CD's, DVD's, or USB floppy drives for drivers was for the initial acquisition of them. After that, they got put up and kept for backup. But most of that went away with the ability to download drivers from the manufacturer website. Windows will install drivers for things from slave harddrives or even network drives. Been doin it that way since Win98.

Booting from USB thumbdrives was a cool idea and often allowed for fixing problems. I just wouldn't want it to be a permanent thing. USB is just too slow for it to be satisfying. I have a few thumbdrives around but I rarely have a need for them.
Click to expand...

I think hes talking about the Press F6 if you need to install a third party SCSI or RAID driver... on Windows XP for Raid drivers.
 
Maybe we really are that much closer to chunkin' those floppy drives?
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Reading this 10 years later and knowing how it turned out is inspiring and awesome...

...I too hated floppies back then.
 
prndll said:
Not sure what world your living in. I stopped using floppies when I stopped using Win98se (didn't even use them much at that time either). The only reason to need any CD's, DVD's, or USB floppy drives for drivers was for the initial acquisition of them. After that, they got put up and kept for backup. But most of that went away with the ability to download drivers from the manufacturer website. Windows will install drivers for things from slave harddrives or even network drives. Been doin it that way since Win98.

Booting from USB thumbdrives was a cool idea and often allowed for fixing problems. I just wouldn't want it to be a permanent thing. USB is just too slow for it to be satisfying. I have a few thumbdrives around but I rarely have a need for them.
Click to expand...

He's talking about installing drivers during the installation of windows. Having to dig out a floppy drive because you needed a driver for your HDD controller sucked balls. Windows did not support devices other than a floppy for driver installation during a windows install until just a few years ago.
 
Merc1138 said:
He's talking about installing drivers during the installation of windows. Having to dig out a floppy drive because you needed a driver for your HDD controller sucked balls. Windows did not support devices other than a floppy for driver installation during a windows install until just a few years ago.
Click to expand...

But you could roll it into your install CD (along with service packs).

http://www.nliteos.com/
 
I actually just purchased my first USB drive.

Long story.

I have also been optical-drive less since around late 2008. I forced myself to back then, when I built the rig in my sig, but it got easier to deal as time went by.
 
defaultluser said:
But you could roll it into your install CD (along with service packs).

http://www.nliteos.com/
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's great until the system you're needing to do an installation on isn't using the same controller so you needed to go burn another disk with another driver, and hope you weren't in a time crunch to get it done. Unless you're doing a deployment for similar systems, it was quicker to just keep a FDD handy.
 
Merc1138 said:
He's talking about installing drivers during the installation of windows. Having to dig out a floppy drive because you needed a driver for your HDD controller sucked balls. Windows did not support devices other than a floppy for driver installation during a windows install until just a few years ago.
Click to expand...

That's funny, I distinctly remember installing Win98se on quite a few computers where the "install disk" was a CD (not a floppy). I also remember installs where the "install disk" was a file on D drive...installing to a blank C drive....where it was a single physical drive cut into two separate partitions. Harddrive controllers just seemed automatic. Windows ended up picking up on the existence of separate raid controller cards and if the drivers where already on D drive at the time of install, it would just install them.
 
What's sad is how little has really changed. Stuff's a bit faster but by and large its the same stuff. You can't even call anything evolutionary let alone revolutionary anymore since everything seems to move in increments of .00001.

I do remember how cool it was the first time I booted off a USB drive though. Nice to be reminded of that
.http://midagedgamer.blogspot.com
 
I have not had a floppy drive in either my work PC or my home system for the last 5 years. The system I had built before my current rig had a floppy drive only because I had a spare one laying around and I figured what the hell I have it I might as well throw it in there.
 
nvgrim said:
I remember paying $80 for my 4gb stick back in the day:( still works to this day though!
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Heck I paid $80 for a 2 GB stick.
But what they bought me was incredible. Instead of carrying a CD folder full of drivers, diags, virus scanners, utilities, everything was on the stick on my keychain.
Now it is stuck in a drawer somewhere; the plastic case worn smooth from years of riding in my pocket. I use a minimum of 16 MB sticks now mainly to copy HD movie rips to my media player. Those can be 3-7 GB each depending on the movie.
 
Merc1138 said:
Yeah, that's great until the system you're needing to do an installation on isn't using the same controller so you needed to go burn another disk with another driver, and hope you weren't in a time crunch to get it done. Unless you're doing a deployment for similar systems, it was quicker to just keep a FDD handy.
Click to expand...

or it could be that you don't have any other working computer at the time of setting a new one up. people expect that you have multiple computers capable of doing everything imaginable and you just add yet another system.

personally, I got rid of the floppy disk drive with win98 i think. i hated the slowness of it and how easily disks got corrupted. and 1,44mb lawl. not enough for even one real media pr0n movie.
 
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