Any need for floppy drive in a new system?

On Apr 13, 3:19*pm, Ken wrote:
Is there any need for a floppy drive in a new system? *If, for example,
I were to use an Intel mb that has its drivers on a floppy, as I have
heard that the DP35DPM does (go figure!), what would the workaround be?
USB? CD?

I figure I would rather not put in the extra cable if it is not needed.
* The $20 expense is negligible.

Thanks
KK

not that i can think of these days, except an external, but really no
use. unless you have some ole games you still want to play.

Conor wrote:

In article ree-
online.co.uk, fwibbler says...

I feel I should point out that not all motherboards with SATA have that
option.
It may not be so much of an issue with modern motherboards but older
ones
with SATA don't always have it.

My 3 year old Asus with only SATA150 does as did the Asrock it
replaced.

By contrast, the MSI KM4M-V did not have it and neither did the ASUS A7V8X
or the ASUS A7S8X-MX.

:-D

--
Graham
Website - http://www.thedeathzone.free-online.co.uk

DK wrote:
In article , Flasherly wrote:
On Apr 13, 4:49 pm, John Doe wrote:
Floppy drives are obsolete.
My 1.44's so obsolete, it quit working. Severe oxidation, dust build-
up over the heads, I suspect.

Just tested mine. Nine years old, haven't been used in about two
years. Works fine. Personally, I would still put it in if I were building
a new system. The overhread is minimal, the simplicity of it and
backward compatibility with everything is worth it.

DK



I installed one of those combo floppy and card reader units. It was a
leftover from a build for a friend who found (and wanted installed
instead) one of those 3.5"/5.25" combo floppies. He decided to fire up
some ancient games with emulators and needed the 5.25".

To tel the truth, the real reason I installed the floppy was so that the
faceplate wouldn't look so "unfinished" (??)

fwibbler said the following on 4/14/2008 9:57 AM:
Conor wrote:

In article ree-
online.co.uk, fwibbler says...

I feel I should point out that not all motherboards with SATA have that
option.
It may not be so much of an issue with modern motherboards but older
ones
with SATA don't always have it.
My 3 year old Asus with only SATA150 does as did the Asrock it
replaced.

By contrast, the MSI KM4M-V did not have it and neither did the ASUS A7V8X
or the ASUS A7S8X-MX.

:-D

Same with my Asus P4PE. Not there.

Conor wrote:

In article , VanguardLH says...

And you've never seen any posts from laptop users that found they needed
a floppy drive? If you haven't, Google.

**** me, come into the ****ing 21st Century will you?

Floppies are ****e. They ****ign slow, have sod all capacity and the
data gets corrupted on them if the wind changes direction.

Yes, we all need a 650MB CD or 4.7GB DVD or 16MB thumb drive to store a
30KB data file. Whether you need a floppy drive is not really your
choice. Someone else or some program will get you stuck needing one.

Conor wrote:

In article , VanguardLH says...
Think of this way: How often have you used the spare tire and jack in
your car? Maybe never. Maybe once in 10 years. But you feel
comfortable knowing it is there in case of an emergency. If someone
said you could buy the car without a spare tire and jack to save all of
$10, would you buy it that way or get the spare?

But a floppy drive that hasn't been used is likely to have the read
heads so full of ****e it won't work.

Is the snow shovel in your garage unusable simply because you haven't
had enough snow to shovel over the several years since you bought it?
You have a weird setup if the heads in your floppy drive are evaporating
or accumulating **** when nothing is rubbing against them.

Conor wrote:

In article , VanguardLH says...

If you need to flash the BIOS to update it (and only do that if the new
version actually gives you something you didn't have before), how are
you going to boot from a device other than your hard drive? You may be
able to configure the BIOS to boot from the CD drive but then you need
to create a bootable CD. It is likely that you won't be able to burn to
that CD when booting from it so you won't be able to save a copy of the
current BIOS as a backup in case the new BIOS is bad, faulty, or
incompletely copied to the EEPROM. It is not safe to perform a BIOS
update while Windows is running.

There are plenty of tools to create a BIOS backup image and virtually
every motherboard can be flashed from within Windows.

A really stupid idea and only practiced by boobs. You cannot interrupt
the BIOS burn process since not enough of the firmware code may be
written at the point of interruption to allow the computer to boot
thereafter. When flashing the BIOS, do it from single-tasking DOS and
to be safe have the computer connected to a UPS. In Windows, all it
would take is some service, background process, or crapware to hang or
crash Windows during the burn to interrupt the process.

Conor wrote:

The simplest way is to set the channel the SATA drive is on to IDE in the
BIOS. That way, you can install XP without needing to install the SATA
controller drivers. You can then install the drivers once Windows is up
and running then change the SATA channel back to SATA in the BIOS.

Yea, that's what I do except I never install the SATA driver and set it
back to SATA mode. What benefit does SATA mode give besides NCQ?

Ken wrote:

Same with my Asus P4PE. Not there.

You sure? Not all mb's call it IDE mode. Might say enhanced mode or
something like that. My Asus P5K has it and so does my Asrock
Dual-Sata2. I never bother with installing SATA drivers and on my P5K I
only use SATA, including for DVD-RW.

Bob Knowlden wrote:
Which OS? What drivers?

It is difficult to install some drivers for Windows XP without using a
floppy. (It is supposed to be possible to slipstream things like RAID
drivers, but I have never done it.) Some boards with Intel chipsets may
not require added drivers to install the OS onto a single SATA drive,
though.

Vista permits you to load drivers from CD or USB flash drive, so you'd
need no floppy there.

A blank floppy costs way more than a blank cdr so they are not only not
needed they are also a waste of money.