You can help make longhorn better!

Add my vote! CD/USB for mass storage drivers! or anything else needed at the time of install. ANYTHING BUT FLOPPIES
 
Another vote from another MS partner. USB instead of Floppy, or at the very least, CD/DVD support.
 
I'll just throw my opinion in as well.

This needs to be implemented. I don't own a USB drive yet, but I would instantly get a hold of one if this came into play. Drivers from a CD need to be an absolute minimum, and maybe from a network share as well. That would be helpful.

Sitting at college, when I need to format, and realize my floppy drive is at home 2 hours away, it's a pain in the neck. Going to the local computer store and spending more than $15 for one also is a pain in the neck.

Get rid of the floppies.
 
I agree..
I hate having to pay out for a FDD when i dont even need one.
Let me use a USB key or a CD of my own making please!
 
Count me in. I've been trying to convince my friends and family to get rid of floppies, as well, by passing out any cheap USB drives when I get them. (Give 'em a week and they're in love!) Anything but the floppy is my vote.
 
Anything but the old FDD would be fine for me. Why make an aging technology a necessary part of an OS install (if you need third party drivers). I had to find a way to hook a FDD to my HTPC just last week to install MCE2005- a royal pain in the ass, considering I had to pull a floppy drive from an old computer in the closet.
 
Floppy install = will wait untill usb install is availible then buy longhorn
Cd/dvd install = not nearly as nice as a usb device, but it is ok...
Usb install = will buy :D
 
When I was working for an OEM, the "floppy disk" issue was a big problem especially with our customers (government agencies) that did not want a floppy drive. Our best bet was to jerry-rig a floppy drive on a master machine, make an image, and ghost the rest. But this created problems for our customers who then would need to make their own image or hook up a floppy drive as we did. Having the ability to load from CD or even a USB floppy would be a godsend for any systems integrator or OEM.
 
I can't believe this is still asked! If the respective companies don't supply the drivers in time to Microsoft, they don't get included. That's why AMD users have had to load drivers through F6 for their SATA ports, and those of us with Intel chipsets didn't have to.
Click to expand...

There was no question. Well those of *you* with Intel chipsets be glorified. I don't think that's the point. If I was shipped a version of XP from its release date I'll be pretty upset considering it is 2005 now. I'm pretty sure the OS installation CDs have undergone some change since their initial release.

Anyway, I was mentioning the annoyance I'm having now with XP as a BTW, to further the cause for additional support being put into *Longhorn*, which is the point of the post.
 
I'd love to see this happen for those who don't use unattended installs.
It is possible to add mass storage drivers to an unattended install and doesn't require you to baby-sit an install. :)
 
Wasn't the floppy disk supposed to die 5 years ago? This antiquated "broke-#*@" technology is still around?

USB sticks and cd roms are the norm. For the price of a floppy drive, you can buy a much higher capacity USB stick, i.e. 1.44MB floppy for $20, vs. 64MB+ USB stick for the same....

Come on MS, migrate to the new hotness and leave the old and busted behind...I mean, Longhorn is supposed to use our GPU's pretty heavily which would kill weaker computers anyway, so go ahead and MIGRATE PLEASE!
 
I don't even put floppy drives in my computers anymore. Talk about a technology that needs to be retired. Along with serial and parallel ports. IMHO.
 
Its simple, offer a (dos) loader that runs prior to the XP/Longhorn Install to format the HDD or create a temp. Partition. Through this loader you could intergrate drivers/mass storage controllers (with a tool like Nlite) into the temp partition and then install windows via that location... It would not take too much effort to make 'this' work.

Actually isnt this possible with WinPE anyhow?? It looks like we just need more control over WinPE and we are set.

If we are on the topic of drivers and Microsoft being behind the times... Who else here agrees that Microsoft needs to either overhaul their "Search online for a Driver for this hardware" or remove it alltogether. Its a useless feature as it never works and even when it does, it gets a driver thats.. at best a year older then the newest one.

I would love to see a "driver install standard" that every company would have to abide by.. this would allow companys to still package their drivers in 'installers' but would allow for instance the OS to easily understandd and install drivers without getting unexpected dialogs/alerts. We need a unified driver database with "standards".
 
Having to buy an FDD for every PC for the sole purpose of installing Windows is an absurd situation.

I tried a USB floppy drive to get around the problem but the Windows XP installation always crashed whenever I tried to use it to install the SATA drivers. If you're going to make use use floppies at least make it work with USB FDDs so we only have to have one drive instead of one for every PC.
 
I love the idea of using a USB thumbdrive for this, I'd support that in a heartbeat! All of you moaning about floppy disks being obsolete: floppy disks still have many uses including BIOS updating (not all manufacturers have a Windows based BIOS updater and some people don't know how to make a bootable CD). Also, those complaining that floppy drives are obsolete, does that mean by extension that the following are also obsolete: serial ports, parallel ports, PS/2 ports?
 
Folks, you can buy 1 (one) USB floppy drive and move it from machine to machine...
 
Phoenix86 said:
Folks, you can buy 1 (one) USB floppy drive and move it from machine to machine...
Click to expand...

Not all systems can work properly with USB FDDs let alone the windows installer usually gets confused when it sees an actual FDD controller and a USB FDD.
 
what's a floppy?

*cough*

we should be able to do the same thing from USB or CD that we can do from floppy. there is no reason that we should need to have such a dated piece of hardware in our systems, it is 2005 (in case you didn't know that)


for those of you that are pro-floppy, what's wrong with you? Why would you waste $15 on a storage device that can't hold more than, what is it, 3MB? Why shouldn't we be able to use a USB drive, a CD, or a DVD, or even multimedia cards (SD, CF, etc)?
 
Man oh man, why can't Microsoft move forward with the times? I mean come on, how friggin hard can it be to change to code to allow for CD or USB media to be bootable from the Windows install.

Maybe the folly manufacturers are trying to push against this so their product does not get totally obsoleted. LOL
 
ir0nw0lf said:
Also, those complaining that floppy drives are obsolete, does that mean by extension that the following are also obsolete: serial ports, parallel ports, PS/2 ports?
Click to expand...

Yes, it does. That's why we have USB ports, to make all that go away.
 
ir0nw0lf said:
Also, those complaining that floppy drives are obsolete, does that mean by extension that the following are also obsolete: serial ports, parallel ports, PS/2 ports?
Click to expand...

Serial ports have gone the way of the dodo on Laptops and a majority of desktops.. and dont get me started on PS/2.. I still get angry that even new computers cant do what an old computer that I had ages ago could do.. It could auto-sense which PS/2 port was being used for either a Mouse/Keyboard I loved it.
 
beanman101283 said:
Yes, it does. That's why we have USB ports, to make all that go away.
Click to expand...
actually i would definitely not say that PS/2 ports are no longer needed, as you can experience lag on a mouse/keyboard when using them through USB (because of IRQ)

/back on topic.
 
I have a USB external floppy drive which sometimes works during install. Mainly depends on the motherboard.

and you guys are complaining about 3.5" floppies? About a month ago a customer came into my shop with a box load of old 5.25" diskettes. Fortunately deep in my closet at home, I found a drive for it and it had the slot connection instead of the pins like today. Pulled all kinds of old junk off her 360K floppies. Even came across GW-BASIC and Basica. Made a copy of those and have done some old school programming. I am 27 now and took a class on Basic programming back in 6th grade.

I even came across two old viruses. Michaelangelo and Stoned

It just goes to show you that you never know when you'll need one. Made a lot of money off her too. It was just over 100 diskettes and concidering the speed of them, it took about 5 hours and then burn all that stuff to one CD. 1,944 5.25" disks could fit on one CD.

Overall, yes MS must start including support for CD and USB flash drives.
 
This gets my vote. It's extremely distastefull to have to use the floppy during installation, especially when the only reason you have a floppy drive is because windows text based setup is to crufty to get drivers from anywhere else.
 
I have not hooked up a floppy drive in years, they can be unreliable randomly. Down with floppys! Up with USB keys/CD's! :D
 
another vote for me, i hate having to take my pc apart to fit a floppy just to reinstall windows, if ms want me to BUY longhorn, then they better put this in, im not buying another floppy, otherwise i'll just go with linux.

(also why cant you get a windows live CD/DVD?)

nez
 
I read some people mentioning that they want an mode where they can pre-load their drivers during install. MS specifically took that out (with the exception of the mass storage drivers) of previous OSes because it made the installs significantly longer and more troublesome (anyone remember OS installs hanging repeatedly when trying to discover new hardware knows what i'm talking about) and for that i'm thankful. It's easier for the most part to get drivers installed once i have windows loaded. Once you have network card drivers, you can download the newest version of everything and you're golden.

However, that single snag of having to provide mass storage drivers has caused hours of headache over the years. 95% of the time you don't have the floppy that came with your motherboard (if one came at all?) so you have to go to a different computer, download the drivers, find a floppy, hook up a floppy to that computer, copy the files to the floppy, disconnect the floppy and hook it up to the other machine, then start the install process. What a HEADACHE! Either throw in some basic network support to allow me to connect to network shares of drivers, or a USB drive, or an already existing partition (that could save time) or a CDROM and copy the drivers from there.

I hate floppies. When I was in college everyone used them for saving their term papers (I worked in the computer lab) and not an day went by that someone wouldn't come up to me, in tears, proclaiming their term paper lost forever because of their floppy disk failing. The irony was that most of these people had desktop computers in their dorm rooms connected to the campus network and were capable of simply transferring their files via that instead of floppy, but they lost their data because of their reliance on old technology. This was last century Microsoft, it's time to get this show on the road!

/signed
 
Wow. That's a no-brainer. I thought MS would have implented it already. They shouldn't need their userbase telling them. Less and less computers are using floppy drives, so this feature is definetely needed.
 
HEHEHE Yaa i hate FLOPPY drives they are out of date, come one MS you are not that OLD! ARE YOU? ;)
 
I agree with that CD/USB drive drivers should be included. With the increasing number of computers without floppy drives, or even lacking foppy drive connectors on the motherboard why would you set it so that you can ONLY use a floppy drive that is ridiculious for Microsoft one of that mose technically advanced companies on the planet to still rely upon antiquated floppy disks.

Also I wouldn't mind having a network support with a network browser to browse the network hard drives for drivers as well.
 
5 pages already... I think the community is pretty much in unanimous agreement on this issue. Hooray for progress!
 
mrtsherman said:
Last time I loaded XP I borrowed my roommates floppy to get the sata drivers loaded. Please add usb/cd-rom support!
Click to expand...
last time i loaded XP i slipstreamed it. a long and very annoying process, but it makes it much easier... it gets my drivers, sp2, and my CD key installed automatically. makes it a sit and wait process instead of a sit and wait and click and wait and click and wait and...

usb/cd support would rock, and i am very surprised that it is not implemented yet, especially since the install has been around for long enough for them to figure something out... i don't see why you still need a floppy drive at all. i try to avoid them... cds for bios flashes, etc.

network setup would be cool as well... linux can do it, why can't windows? ;) last i checked, 100mbit ethernet is faster than my cdrom drive.

mwhahaha
 
It's miserable needing a floppy to install RAID drivers. I have to hook a floppy up to another PC, copy the drivers to a floppy (hoping that I still have a good floppy disk around), then disconnect the drive and hook it back into the system I'm building. All this when the drivers were on a cd to begin with...
 
Yes, yes, a million times, dear-Lord-in-heaven, yes! I can't begin to tell how frustrated I am that I cannot use a CD-RW, a USB drive, or even a USB floppy drive to load drivers. Ever since Win2k this has been ridiculously annoying. RAID drivers, SATA drivers, future storage tech, etc. NEED this ability.
 
one quite confusing thing is before SP2 came out if i go to windows update then it has drivers for my SATA Raid, on my motherboard, so why were these not put into SP2, did they improve the installation process at all with SP2???
 
I agree USB or CD, I am so tired of having to dig up a old floppy just to install the newest SATA drivers.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top