Floppies are the Future

I'm not sure if my college has any computers on campus with floppy drives. I'm sure there are a few, but there aren't a whole lot. All my profs expect us to use either a cd, thumb drive, or the network storage drive.

Oh, and about that dumping the legacy stuff, we just got a brand new Dell server in last week... It's only got vga and ps/2. It won't accept USB keyboards. weird.
 
I tried to ditch the floppy years ago. I finally gave up and there is one in all three of our desktops.:( *sigh* On my main I have one for setting up my raid array, on my second I have one for making the raid install disc because I always forget to do this before I start :eek: , and one in the household comp because eventually somebody shows up with one and acts like I have the problem if I don't have a floppy drive.:rolleyes:

It seems they are getting harder and harder to come by. I finally came across a small stack of reliable ones and have stashed it away on my media shelf. Most I have come by ohterwise don't work more than once or twice.
 
I don't have a single floppy drive in any of my machines (2 laptops, htpc, file server, and two new systems I am putting together). However, I do keep a single USB floppy drive (from one of the laptops) around just in case.

Every single system, even my XP2800+ HTPC will boot from that USB floppy, so I don't have a need to waste space in any of my boxes. When not in use, that floppy drive sits at the bottom of a drawer.

Honestly, I haven't used a floppy disk at home in..2 years, give or take a couple months. My wife on the other hand brought some work home on floppy once or twice in that two years, until I bought her a thumbdrive.

Personally, I would like to see floppy disks, parrallel ports, and IDE to go the way of the Dodo. I do still have some use for the serial ports (controlling my cable STB from my HTPC) and PCI slots (some of the better TV tuners are still PCI and not PCI-e).
 
farscapesg1 said:
I don't have a single floppy drive in any of my machines (2 laptops, htpc, file server, and two new systems I am putting together). However, I do keep a single USB floppy drive (from one of the laptops) around just in case.

Every single system, even my XP2800+ HTPC will boot from that USB floppy, so I don't have a need to waste space in any of my boxes. When not in use, that floppy drive sits at the bottom of a drawer.

Honestly, I haven't used a floppy disk at home in..2 years, give or take a couple months. My wife on the other hand brought some work home on floppy once or twice in that two years, until I bought her a thumbdrive.

Personally, I would like to see floppy disks, parrallel ports, and IDE to go the way of the Dodo. I do still have some use for the serial ports (controlling my cable STB from my HTPC) and PCI slots (some of the better TV tuners are still PCI and not PCI-e).
Click to expand...

I would like to see the serial ports go, but alot of stuff still uses it. I have to use a USB to serial adapter on my notebook for controlling routers and switches.
 
Why so much hate for IDE? After many years the number of devices I have that use IDE is... is quite a bit. I'd hate to have to give up so many hard drives and optical drives and buy all SATA. Don't get me wrong, I haven't purchased a new IDE hard drive in a few years, but I've still got a good number in use, and some in storage just in case I need one in case of a failure. As for optical drives, all of mine are IDE. It's only been a few months since SATA drives have been around at a good cost. Before that you had to spend 2 or 3 times more to get one, and I saw no advantage to it. In fact, the only thing I heard was people bitching how their SATA optical drive was conflicting with their SATA controller and RAID configurations.
 
Where I work; the factory uses 5.25" floppies for data from tests and eproms for program data all brought together by a cube pc. The main test engineer says they are great because they don't get hot; just don't switch em off cos 25 year old PC's don't switch back on easily!

Oh and we are currently in the process of renewing all the test computers and are using windows 95 and 98 based PCs so no USB pens here please, oh and no virus scanners either :p !!
 
fileserver.jpg


A quick cellphone pic of the dual 3-1/2" floppies on one of the old fileservers at work. I don't know why or how this happened, but talk about server-grade hardware - redundant floppies!
 
taqueso said:
A quick cellphone pic of the dual 3-1/2" floppies on one of the old fileservers at work. I don't know why or how this happened, but talk about server-grade hardware - redundant floppies!
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They're not redundant, it's a RAID-0 setup.
 
Wow, those floppy prices are high. Just buy the double density disks, drill an extra hole in the other corner and format them to 1.44mb. :)

Who else remembers that old trick? :)
 
scoob8000 said:
Wow, those floppy prices are high. Just buy the double density disks, drill an extra hole in the other corner and format them to 1.44mb. :)

Who else remembers that old trick? :)
Click to expand...

Worked great as long as the media was double-sided. I actually had a nice hole cutter for 5-1/4s that lined up the disk and made a perfect square hole in the right spot. I tried to find a pic of one, but no dice. Before that, I used a hole-punch.

Edit: Figured out they are called disk notchers. Here are couple pics, neither is exactly like mine was, but the 2nd is pretty close. You can't see it, but the side not photographed of the 2nd one has a slot for inserting the disk, so it is aligned properly.
notcher1.jpg

notcher2.jpg
 
marsofold said:
Mitchell OnDemand
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Wow... I had no idea... Does Mitchell offer on on-line version? I ask because the shops I'm responsible for may be switching to Mitchell (have been using AllData for a long time.. but Mitchell just dropped their prices...alot) Now, if there is no way around this floppy issue, that may change things, as none of my machines have a fdd... and I have no intentions of installing them simply to use Mitchell....

Any info on this would be much appreciated...and sorry if this is a bit of a threadjack...
 
I gotta agree with Dan. Floppy drive is too outdated. You need it for 1 reason. That is to load scsi/controller drivers when you install a prevista windows. Hell I haven't used a floppy drive to flash a motherboard in a few years. For one a lot of the bios files I've had to deal with would not fit on a floppy(intel server boards).

I keep a usb floppy drive around for loading raid card drivers when loading windows. Normal person wouldn't even need that.
 
Allen-Bradley PLC software comes with a license floppy that it modifies when programs are installed to limit the number of installations. I write protect those immediately, and make bit-exact copies. Then I use the "new" license floppies to install and can refresh them as needed. Doesn't get rid of the need for a FDD though.



Here is an interesting program I came across searching for floppy emulator: http://www.oldskool.org/pc/flopper/
 
taqueso said:
Allen-Bradley PLC software comes with a license floppy that it modifies when programs are installed to limit the number of installations. I write protect those immediately, and make bit-exact copies. Then I use the "new" license floppies to install and can refresh them as needed. Doesn't get rid of the need for a FDD though.



Here is an interesting program I came across searching for floppy emulator: http://www.oldskool.org/pc/flopper/
Click to expand...

I've encountered many applications like that too. Companies need to not purchase those applications if they can avoid it. Those application developers are lazy bastards and they need to find a better way. Not to mention, they aren't doing their customers any favors by forcing floppy drive purchases on them.

It's also been my experience that any company that has such a copy protection/authorization method like the one described above is selling second rate software in the first place.
 
mikeblas said:
Microsoft doesn't write BIOSes.
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It has nothing to do with the BIOS. The Windows installer for Windows 2000 needed to be capable of loading storage drivers from USB drives and certainly from CD rather than forcing you to load storage drivers via floppy. Windows XP most certainly needed to be capable of that as well, but it wasn't.
 
mikeblas said:
What is it that mounts the USB drive as a file system before Windows has loaded?
Click to expand...

I haven't worked with a system that old in along time, but as I recall, there were motherboards that could handle USB drives as bootable media back then. Granted flash drives weren't really around, but USB hard drives were.

BTW that's no excuse for Microsoft to not allow the installation of drivers through other means than a floppy disk drive even that far back.
 
I had a teacher like this once. I said hey, none of the computers in my home have a floppy drive. I did however have a USB drive in hand and asked if I could use that. He agreed. I also had one who insisted we have a ZIP DISK!!! No one in my class knew wtf that was, thus they didn't have one. Some teachers need to go back to school themselves.

On a separate note I had one who insisted every screen shot of directory structure was setup like he had it with your user account name being your full name. I had to explain the security risk in that and every screen shot had my real account name blanked out. :)
 
Dan_D said:
BTW that's no excuse for Microsoft to not allow the installation of drivers through other means than a floppy disk drive even that far back.
Click to expand...

If the BIOS doesn't support the enumeration of the USB bus, or mounting devices as BIOS-compatible drives, how would the install code of Windows access the device?
 
What is it that mounts the USB drive as a file system before Windows has loaded?
Click to expand...

mikeblas said:
If the BIOS doesn't support the enumeration of the USB bus, or mounting devices as BIOS-compatible drives, how would the install code of Windows access the device?
Click to expand...


With a driver. The BIOS never mounts a filesystem, ever. Except for booting off a USB device (which still does not mount a filesystem), the BIOS does not need to be aware of USB for it to be used by an OS. In the case of booting from a USB device, the BIOS is still just responsible for starting the bootloader, which then reads the filesystem (in most cases, some system load a kernel that is not in a filesystem) and starts the OS.

a random link with info on the boot process, the parts up to ntldr are not specific to windows
 
mikeblas said:
If the BIOS doesn't support the enumeration of the USB bus, or mounting devices as BIOS-compatible drives, how would the install code of Windows access the device?
Click to expand...

What about CDROM support? It was commonplace to have drivers distributed on CD even in 2000. I think it's reasonable to assume that if the installer booted off CD, and the CD is detectable to load all the built-in drivers, it could prompt for more CDs as well. Or perhaps the install procedure is still accessing the CDROM drive through BIOS routines at that point? I'm not familiar with the intricacies of the Windows install procedure. For that matter, why not let Windows load some drivers (like USB HID and storage, for example) and then continue to load more later? I don't see any technical limitations that weren't imposed by Windows in this matter.
 
taqueso said:
With a driver.
Click to expand...

Right. The problem is that Dan expects Microsoft to write all the necessary drivers and ship them in Windows, on the CD, for hardware that wasn't standardized and/or didn't exist at the time the product was being developed.

Thing is, the programmatic interfaces were still non-standard, the ink wasn't dry, and so on. Instead of spending all that time to write drivers for USB, why not write the drivers for the devices themselves?

taqueso said:
The BIOS never mounts a filesystem, ever.
Click to expand...
That's right; I misspoke.

Note that your "random link" explains the boot process when the OS is installed. What we're talking about is setup -- the OS isn't installed, and isn't really loaded. The NT Installer does not provide anything like the full faculty of the OS. It isn't even close until the machine reboots and shows the graphical part of setup.

unhappy_mage said:
What about CDROM support? It was commonplace to have drivers distributed on CD even in 2000.
Click to expand...
Sure. These interfaces were far more mature, since they had started shipping around 1995. During the development of Windows 2000 (1998 thrrough 2000, say), CD-ROMS were very common. But USB drives were very rare; PC99 had only just started specifying USB ports on machines, and USB keychains weren't nearly as common or inexpensive as they are today.

unhappy_mage said:
For that matter, why not let Windows load some drivers (like USB HID and storage, for example) and then continue to load more later?
Click to expand...
Trying more drivers causes more problems than it cures. It slows down the boot process. The media content must be frozen before it ships, so when installing Windows 2000 in 2003, customers are still using what was available at the time of RTM. Since there was so little standardization at the time, any detection software ran the risk of tripping over ill-behaved hardware and crashing the machine--very bad news for setup, I'm sure you'll agree.

Having the user provide their own driver was actually a safety measure. Device presence test code that was well-tested and more stable could run and not fudge anything, while drivers for devices that caused problems could be left to explicitly load with user intervention.
 
farscapesg1 said:
I don't have a single floppy drive in any of my machines (2 laptops, htpc, file server, and two new systems I am putting together). However, I do keep a single USB floppy drive (from one of the laptops) around just in case.

Every single system, even my XP2800+ HTPC will boot from that USB floppy, so I don't have a need to waste space in any of my boxes. When not in use, that floppy drive sits at the bottom of a drawer.

Honestly, I haven't used a floppy disk at home in..2 years, give or take a couple months. My wife on the other hand brought some work home on floppy once or twice in that two years, until I bought her a thumbdrive.

Personally, I would like to see floppy disks, parrallel ports, and IDE to go the way of the Dodo. I do still have some use for the serial ports (controlling my cable STB from my HTPC) and PCI slots (some of the better TV tuners are still PCI and not PCI-e).
Click to expand...


I dont keep them in my system anymore, I use a USB one. However I found that some recent motherboards will not let you load the F6 drivers from a USB floppy.

By BX2 and IN9 do load F6 drivers just fine from a Floppy,

However my 3 DFI SLI-DR Experts do not.
 
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