Originally posted by: RideFree
Insane,You might mention the 1 caveat to this TIKO, namely that this is not compatible with NT4s RDisk as it insists on writing to the "A" floppy (at least I'm not aware of a work around to this). If you know differently, please advise.I have no floopy drives in my systems, so I use a boot CD,
Also, how does this work if you need Ghost (for example) to create the boot disk(s) for access to the CDRWs, network, tape &/or SCSI boot drivers.
I've thought for quite some time that we should be able to get rid of the 'ol floppy but due to the above, haven't ventured into that area again after being so resoundly defeated by WinNT.
Wouldn't one of your systems require at least 1 floppy?
Not sure on NT4 RideFree, but it has worked for me on any board that allows booting from a CD. I have an boot CD image I got from somewhere that loads up nothing but CD drivers and drops you at a "A" prompt. The system at that point sees the CD drive as "A:". It will also assign letters to the other CD drives in the system. I just boot from that, wait till it dumps me to the A: prompt, throw in my CDRW with the AWDFlash and bios files, and run it.
I know what you are saying about NT4 I think, but this is more of a problem with loading Windows, not flashing the bios. There is one thing that couldn't be done without a floppy on this board when loading the OS however. If you are trying to do a fresh install of XP to a HD or RAID array on the HP controller, you would need to have the HP drivers on a floppy for the OS install to "see" the HP controller. So the hitting "F6" operation when loading XP onto drives on the HP would require a floppy.
So, yes, there are some specific times when a floppy may be needed, but I haven't come across any that affect me, so I am happily "floppy free".
One other thing, if you don't have a boot CD image, I used to use an old Win98 CD that would load drivers for the CD drives.