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external floppy for SATA set up

G

Gibroni

Weaksauce
Joined
Jan 17, 2003
Messages
94
I am thinking about getting a new SATA hard drive. I need to replace my socket A mobo and I can't afford to get into an Athlon 64 system yet. Because I would need to buy memory and a PCIe video card too. I just bought a AGP 6600GT and a mobile athlon cpu within the last couple months, so I'm just going to replace my EPoX 8RDA3+ (bulging caps), with a MSI K7N2 Delta2-LSR. I'd like to use that HDD, a 160GB Maxtor, in another system and pick up a new SATA Diamondmax 10. I ditched the floppy when I built my last desktop and just don't want to bother putting one in my current system. My question is, do I need a floppy if I just want to run one SATA HDD, no raid? The floppy is just for RAID drivers, right? If I do need it can I use an external floppy drive, USB? I have a card reader, can I transfer the files from the floppy to a flash memory card and use that?
 
I too am wondering about this subject.

I will be moving to A64 soon and the board will have SATA.

I will not be running raid...ever...and I don't have use for a floppy, but I do have a USB floppy just in case (my current mobo accepts it for bios flashing).

Thank you for making this thread, this should be interesting to discover. :)
 
Unless your mobo somehow emulates an external USB floppy or card reader to be "A:" on your system (and having owned a K7N2, I can tell you it doesn't), then windows setup will not see it when you hit F6. I've tried hard, on various systems, to get a USB Floppy drive to work but to no avail. Just bite the bullet and get another floppy drive; I have one lying around just for that purpose.
 
I'm thinking of just installing the floppy inside the case. I have the Antec Sonanta, and the hard drive mounting rails are sideways. If I ever need the floppy, like once, I can just take the side panel off or just cut a hole in the side panel and let the floppy drive stick out. I didn't think you needed it if you were not running the HD in RAID.
 
I just went through this with my new build, and I had to bite the bullet and buy a floppy drive (~$10 with tax and shipping). I used it for this purpose and to flash the BIOS, and now I am uninstalling it. I'm gonna throw it in the closet, and if I need to reflash the BIOS ever or for God knows what, I can dig it out... but no use leaving it installed in the case.

Back to the point, the floppy that came with the mobo is labelled SATA RAID drivers, but there were two sets of required drivers I needed to load (through F6 during XP install), one just for the SATA controller and the second for RAID. I don't plan on using RAID right now, I only have 1 drive in the system, and it is SATA. I figured the extra drivers couldn't hurt anything, and if I want to enable RAID later I won't need to dig out the floppy. But, that one set of drivers was just for the SATA controller so I could use the drive (although BIOS found and recognized the drive before I loaded the drivers).
 
So can you install the RAID drivers but not use RAID if you have two or more HDD drives in it on SATA?

Also, since a combo floppy/card reader uses the floppy connection, that would be good right?

I think I will go that route since I need to get an internal card reader anyway for my custom case.
 
The card reader itself is USB. It just comes in the same housing. The floppy connects to the floppy IDE connection and the card reader connects to a USB port. With the floppy drive, do what I'm gonna do, install inside the case in an open HDD spot. Then when you do need it just pop off the side panel. My side panel's off most of the time anyway.
 
I am building a custom case and I need and internal card reader, so one with a floppy combo would work perfect size wise for my case plans so far.

:)
 
You can also slipstream F6 drivers onto the CD. However, it is somewhat complicated, as it requires modifying the list of drivers to be loaded at the beginning of setup. A quick review of some Google results should put you on the right track.
 
That is a good idea. I need to update my slipstreamed XP CD anyway. :)
 
DougLite said:
You can also slipstream F6 drivers onto the CD. However, it is somewhat complicated, as it requires modifying the list of drivers to be loaded at the beginning of setup. A quick review of some Google results should put you on the right track.
Click to expand...

Just download nLite and let it do all the work for you. It couldn't be any simpler with nLite. I had no problem slipstreaming the nVRAID drivers onto my XP install. Its also a good idea to burn the ISO to CD-RW media so that you can modify if to add new drivers or tweak settings.
 
burningrave101 said:
Just download nLite and let it do all the work for you. It couldn't be any simpler with nLite. I had no problem slipstreaming the nVRAID drivers onto my XP install. Its also a good idea to burn the ISO to CD-RW media so that you can modify if to add new drivers or tweak settings.
Click to expand...
I however needed ~7 tries and lots of manual editing before getting my slipstreamed nLite to work. I was using v 1.01 or something and that was b0rked.
 
Empyrean said:
I just went through this with my new build, and I had to bite the bullet and buy a floppy drive (~$10 with tax and shipping). I used it for this purpose and to flash the BIOS, and now I am uninstalling it. I'm gonna throw it in the closet, and if I need to reflash the BIOS ever or for God knows what, I can dig it out... but no use leaving it installed in the case.

Back to the point, the floppy that came with the mobo is labelled SATA RAID drivers, but there were two sets of required drivers I needed to load (through F6 during XP install), one just for the SATA controller and the second for RAID. I don't plan on using RAID right now, I only have 1 drive in the system, and it is SATA. I figured the extra drivers couldn't hurt anything, and if I want to enable RAID later I won't need to dig out the floppy. But, that one set of drivers was just for the SATA controller so I could use the drive (although BIOS found and recognized the drive before I loaded the drivers).
Click to expand...

You've probably got 2 different SATA controlers on that mobo.
I've got an ABIT IC7-MAX3 and it's like that. One SATA controller is part of the intel chipset and the other one is a silicon image add-on. So what you've done is loaded the drivers for the second SATA controler. Without a drive hooked to it, it would just have showed up in the device manager as pucked up. - bad driver - etc.


 
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