"Floppy Drives...? Who uses those these days!?"... You might ask. Well, I must say that a lot of users who are upgrading their PC's don't seem to understand the importance of purchasing a Floppy Drive along with their 8800 Ultra's and Quad-Core 6600's. "Oh what to do with that empty 3.5" drive bay in my Thermaltake case?"......... Well, my advice... ADD A FLOPPY DRIVE. Why? Let's review a little: Although we don't use floppy's for storing small files like we used to, floppy's are SOMETIMES essential for Windows installations, BIOS and driver updates, disk partitioning, and 3rd party software for MBR recoveries. When installing Windows XP on a SATA HDD, the installation may come up with an error saying that "no hard disk's were detected". This is because you need to install "3rd party RAID or SCSI drivers" by pressing F6 right before the installation. And as you may have guessed... the drivers for them come in floppy's. :doh: Of course, there is a way to bypass this by slipstreaming the drivers required into your Windows XP disc installation but that's a hassle and requires some effort and i think everyone can agree with me on that. Also, for some reason, I used to run into problems booting up a Windows XP disc even though i set my CD-ROM to be my priority boot. Microsoft came up with a 6-set-floppy disk solution that boots the installation for you. Then again, of course, we can all create a bootable installation because we're all so fancy (I did it too)... BIOS updates. The fastest way to do this is by floppy. Most motherboard manufacturers release BIOS updates that are designed to fit on a floppy. If you want to use a CD to do so you can by searching for some tricks here and there. ANOTHER MAJOR IMPORTANCE OF FLOPPY'S - STARTUP DISKS These type of disks were once commonly used to initialize a format before installing Windows 95 or 98 and may still be used if desired. Today you may use it to partition your Master Hard disk by using the FDISK command. I'm not sure if this may be used on NTFS file systems though. But anyways, besides FDISK and its wonders, a Startup floppy disk may be used for many reasons. It may be used to copy files from drive to drive by using the COPY command if you hard drive fails to load. Ever get that annoying message "NTDLR is missing, press any key to restart"...? NTDLR is a .sys file in your C: drive that is associated with your boot process. Sometimes, Windows simply bypasses this error and boots up normally. BUT, if you keep on getting this error... the easiest way to solve it is to have a copy of the NTDLR file on a floppy disk, load Windows with the floppy inside... AND POOF! WINDOWS BOOTS AGAIN! How great was that? All you need to do now is copy the NTDLR file back to the C: drive from your floppy and you won't get that error again. Any other simple solution? I don't think so... SO, my point here today was to send a clear message to some of us "computer_warriors" ... if you buy a new computer, or upgrade... and have an FDD slot in your motherboard... and have an empty 3.5" drive bay in your case... and can spare about $10-20... GET A FLOPPY DRIVE. You will greatly appreciate it once you run into problems. Hope i was of some help here and there. PEACE
very well said, i concur, i had a problem installing a OS with the disk (couldn't read my hard disks) had to buy an external floppy, was easy to install & i installed the OS with the floppy drive, easy & successfully, i am purchasing a new computer & a floppy is a MUST!
There have been a few times people have had problems on these forums and they have hit a dead end because they dont have a floppy drive. To be honest it didnt even occur to me until then that people dont buy one. They only cost a fiver too! I wouldn't go without one! I normally use it to take documents to the pc with a printer... we really do need a print server! Bootup disks, memtest, grub, microscope etc etc.... Ill be honest though say I get really nervous updating my BIOS with a floppy simply because they can fail for no apparent reason. Ive tended to use asus motherboards which allow you to do it in windows. I dont have asus or windows anymore so dont update bios anymore!
well i admit i've actually killed a few old 486 boards, anyway, back to floppies, personally, my floppy is disabled in the BIOS because, presumably the drive failed, when i received an error message from the BIOS ages ago, so i disabled it, as my motherboard has the option to boot from CD / DVD i see no need for a floppy drive BTW: i even have a bootable Win98 instalation CD Edit: Congrats zeus, a BIOS flash is not a good idea, unless you are 110% sure it will solve your problems or make hardware you've bought compatible with your system
