Who still use a floppy drive???

[Jgtdragon]

I only use the floppy drive to boot into DOS for update bios. I don't use it often and the cable is blocking air flow. I am thinking of taking it out. Does external floppy drive or converter to serial exists? Since I only use it couple time in months, I can just plug in to the back of my case and clear out the cables for better air flow.

What you guys think?

 

[cmdrdredd]

external floppy drives exist but I dunno if they are bootable.

 

[Odoacer]

I don't even have one. Haven't figured out how to update my BIOS without it yet

 

[paralazarguer]

Same here. Only for BIOS updates. Since it's only done once every fed months I just open the case, plug in the floppy cable, and the berg, put the boot disk and close the case. It's only once every few months then it gets removed. If you're too lazy for this you can get a USB floppy drive. Modern BIOSes will allow you to boot from USB devices without any problem although you will have to set it up in the boot order. Another thing you might want to consider is getting a motherboard which will allow you to flash from within windows. I never did trust that though.

 

[NeoMadHatter]

i do at work, i have to save all the stuff on it sometimes to give to co-workers and at school sometimes to do work in computer labs with group projects. stupid group projects needing floppies.

 

[mastertech01]

Since I use all SCSI, I decided to get some use of the IDE ports, so I am using an LS120 in lieu of a floppy drive. So I can do the occasional bios flash or boot to dos with floppies, and get use of the 120MB disks any other time. It works out real well.

 

[madthumbs]

I use it to back up favorites, txt files, emails, and address book.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

no need for floppies, i just make bootable cd's

 

[lubetek]

i have on in da rig.....dont use it too often tho

 

[Vinny N]

If you're just worried about air flow, surely you can think of an appropriate way to fold and tuck the cable away.

 

[Paulson]

I don't really use it, but I have it there incase I'd ever need it lol

 

[BeauJangles]

I don't have mine hooked up, and I can't say i've missed it.

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

Is there really a reason why you *have* to flash a bios from a floppy as opposed to flashing from the hard drive from a safe command prompt?

 

[BFG10K]

I still use mine for booting into DOS and flashing the system BIOS and for the occasional small file transfer. It's not very often that I do this but at the same time I'd never give up my FDD.

 

[Vinny N]

Gonad the Barbarian:

No. In fact, I avoid flashing from a floppy always. I see a bad floppy disk as much more likely than my hard drive going bad
The flash goes faster from a hard drive too, so less chance for a power outage to cut in or whatever.

Anyways, I seem to recall at least one or two motherboard manufacturers that agreed with this as well, they, at most, recommended booting off a floppy to have a clean environment(no programs/TSRs running in memory) from which to flash the BIOs with the program+image from the hard drive.

The only reasoning I can see in the *must flash from floppy* model is that perhaps there is still some concern about the functions of the BIOs affecting reading data from the hard drive, especially if it's on an ide controller that the motherboard BIOS controls settings for. The floppy controller, and therefore floppy drive seems to be in some sort of realm of its own since booting off the floppy is the only emergency recovery/reflash option when a BIOS is bad/missing/corrupted short of hotflashing or using a a standalone device to reflash the chip.

Apparently it's some concern of the past though if motherboard manufacturers have ventured so far as to allow updating the BIOS with a windows program. Still some people have had problems with that method and still swear by floppies I'm sure.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

burn the stuff to a cd and flash your bios from that!

 

[AShadeOfClear]

For the last two or three years I've needed to use floppy disks for boot disks, utilities, and moving small files such as drivers from one system to another, where I don't have CDROM access. I've been having to re-use disks of mine that were up to ten years old! (Gosh, I feel old). As you can imagine, many of these diskettes caused problems or completely failed on me, causing much frustration. I decided I had more than enough, and so I recently bought a 100pack of Memorex floppy disks for $17 :Q I will never rewrite a floppy disk again.

I'm well aware that you can make bootable CDRoms, but it seems that in the software I'm using, Nero, I need a bootable floppy to use as the source. It won't let me simply take a folder with io.sys, command.com and msdos.sys and burn it. So, floppy drives are still needed at least on the system with the CDR. Right?

 

[Insane3D]

No. I use a bootable CD-R to get to a comand prompt, then put the bios updates on a CD-RW and run it from that..no problems. I sometimes even use an old Win98 CD to boot to a command prompt, then use a CD-RW with the bios and flash program on it...

Get with the times people....hehe

 

[Insane3D]

"I'm well aware that you can make bootable CDRoms, but it seems that in the software I'm using, Nero, I need a bootable floppy to use as the source. It won't let me simply take a folder with io.sys, command.com and msdos.sys and burn it. So, floppy drives are still needed at least on the system with the CDR. Right?"

Actually, no, you don't need a bootable floppy to make a bootable CD. I downloaded a bootable CD image file from somewhere...burned the image file to a CD-R and labeled it "Boot CD"....Voilla!

 

[Leo V]

I get by without any floppy drive.

I have WinXP on a FAT32 partition. Whenever I need to flash BIOS, I simply boot from a Win98SE CD and go into command prompt! Much faster than floppy, too.

 

[jaeger66]

I don't have a floppy, I use boot CDs for everything a floppy used to do. But I would never flash a BIOS right from the disc, I always copy the file and flash utility to a ramdrive first.

Some newer boards can also boot from USB floppy drives.

 

[spanky]

i use it to transfer small files.

 

[Rand]

I use it for BIOS updates and on the very rare occasion I'll have need to transfer a few small files to someone else's system so i keep the FDD around.
It gets extremely little work, but I wouldnt want to be without it for those rare occasions in which it's useful.

 

[Stompz138]

I use floppies for bios updates, drivers (old ones since most are greater than 1.4 megs), and storing homework. I've found floppies the most effecient form of media when it comes to storing homework since hard drives tend to fail every now and then.

 

[Alphazero]

I took mine out about five months ago and I've completely forgotten about it. I only ever used it for formatting. I flash my BIOS in Windows with AsusUpdate.

I hate floppies - they're painfully slow and capacity is severely restricted. Completely useless, for most intents and purposes.