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New cases with no floppy bay

Yes that's what you use if you want a floppy.

Use a bootable USB thumbdrive for all other things.
 
I haven't put a floppy in any computer I've built for six, seven years. If you can't boot into Windows, surely you still have an optical drive. You can use GParted's LiveCD to partition.

Pretty much anything can be done with a bootable CD. If not, many motherboards support thumbdrives now.
 
I just leave the case open and rig up a floppy temporarily for the couple minutes it takes to do whatever I'm doing. That's only if the USB floppy I have doesn't work. Most new motherboards will accept a USB floppy in place of the one on the floppy controller.
 
Hmm, nice, and I can take out the damn floppy cable! Will try those suggestions on my current system, thanks!
 
Varmint said:
Hmm, nice, and I can take out the damn floppy cable! Will try those suggestions on my current system, thanks!
Click to expand...

Lol...I have a floppy drive ready to go in my drawer "preconnected" to a floppy cable for whenever I need it ;). Hardest part is finding where the floppy power connector is tucked away in my case.
 
kirbyrj said:
Lol...I have a floppy drive ready to go in my drawer "preconnected" to a floppy cable for whenever I need it ;). Hardest part is finding where the floppy power connector is tucked away in my case.
Click to expand...

Crap, now I'll have to find the plastic cover for the 3.5" bay. That's probably long gone. Doh!
 
haha...I don't even have the plastic cover. I have to push a metal tab with a screw driver to get the floppy to eject ;). It was out of an old compaq or something like that.
 
Handy for the occasional system that insists on drivers from drive :A (my old system from early 04 needed them for the SATA controller).
 
Outamyhead said:
Handy for the occasional system that insists on drivers from drive :A (my old system from early 04 needed them for the SATA controller).
Click to expand...

You still need them for the SATA controller if you're using WinXP with any sort of RAID array. Obviously, slipstreaming drivers is nice, but it's usually quicker to just use the floppy.
 
Thank god for Vista seeing drivers wherever you got a FAT32 or NTFS partition mounted.
 
What's a floppy? LoL. If you really need one, just get an external usb floppy drive, they're pretty cheap I would think.
 
If by chance, a case has an external 3.5 bay, I just fill it with a $10 multifunction card reader/usb hub.

RIP FLOPPIES
 
Varmint said:
What do people do with the newer cases, get a 3.5 to 5.25 mounting bracket, like this?

http://www.xpcgear.com/floppymountblk.html

Don't you still want to have a floppy for stuff like hard drive partitioning, or if you can't boot into Windows?
Click to expand...

why would you need a floppy to partition a harddrive? or if you cant boot into windows?

neither one requires a floppy, time to move out of the stone age my friend.
 
I put a floppy drive in my machines because I have many spare floppy drives and my cases all have one or more external 3.5 inch bays. I still use them about once or twice a year for BIOS updates and things that are simpler if I just use a floppy.

Interestingly what I don't put in my PCs any more are optical drives. I have a USB based one that I keep around for simplifying OS installs and burning discs but otherwise I never use them.

One of these days I'll convert my floppy drives into front panel eSATA ports.
 
I've got a full, bootable, XP partition installed on a 4gb flash drive...

Plug, select it as the boot device, boot and go.

Only time I've ever needed a floppy was to re-flash a broken HD4870 GPU...
 
Do you need a newer motherboard to see USB drives as bootable? I don't think my motherboard sees those (NForce4 939).
 
MrGuvernment said:
why would you need a floppy to partition a harddrive? or if you cant boot into windows?

neither one requires a floppy, time to move out of the stone age my friend.
Click to expand...

I think it's more for the RAID drivers. Still needed if you're using XP unfortunately :(. Slipstreaming isn't all that hard, but it takes longer than ripping out the floppy and doing it that way ;).
 
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