Floppies Stiffed!

[GNEP]

Not exactly breaking news, but...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2905953.stm

[The PIT]

Still be around for a short while though. Bit like your mother in law.

[GNEP]

To be fair though I disconnected my drive a while back and forgot to re-connect it. Didn't notice for about a year when I completely stripped the machine down for a rebuild/upgrade.

Booting was the last thing left to use them for (small file transfer now done 100% by email from work to home etc) - and once I had learnt how to make bootable CD's (one win2k install disk and one win98 boot disk) no need at all any more. And the CD's last for more than 2 weeks before going corrupt...

And luckily the other half's mother doesn't become an in-law until september next year

[The PIT]

Still use mine for booting ghost to do my backups. Saying that a cd would probably be more reliable.

[SpiralDragon]

use mine for some flashing excercises .... oupss wrong topic.. .

[Gurm]

Floppies are, sadly, still required for many things. Until someone makes a transparent zip drive, many boot-disk type applications just won't work on anything but a floppy. Sorry, but this article is tripe.

People have been heralding the death of the floppy since the mid 90's. Oops.

I HAVE SPOKEN.

- Gurm

[SpiralDragon]

all bow down befor the great and mighty Gurm... for he has spoken

[agallag]

The only thing I've used floppies for in the last year was to flash the bios on some scsi hard disks in our compaq servers. You can flash the every other bios in the system (mainboard, array controllers, etc.) without a floppy, but the disks themselves can only be flashed by floppy for some reason. The annoying part of it is that in order to cover all the different models of hard disks, it takes up 12 floppies! I had to order two boxes of floppies just to flash our damn hard disks!

Andrew has spoken

[Gurm]

Yep. And note that while for many of them it's just talk, nearly every motherboard manufacturer specifies where to flash from.

"You CANNOT flash from floppy."

"You MUST flash from floppy."

etc.

I have spoken.

- Gurm

[UtwigMU]

I have flashed my motherboard, both of my graphic cards, my CD-ROM and my CD-R.

Except for the last two (which want to be flashed only under Win98) I did it all from floppy.

Also restoring and imaging to CD-Rs, well I could burn bootable CD which extracts PQDI to RAMDRIVE. But it's easier to format a floppy.

For transfering old DOS games I download from internet to my 386, I just use parallel ZIP drive.

I mean, you need floppy twice a year or so, but at those times you need it. Also when your CD-ROM gives up ghost, floppy is pretty nifty. And it's 5-10€.

[Gurm]

Yeah. It's one of those "you don't need it often, but woebetide ye if you don't have it" things.

I have spoken.

- Gurm

[GNEP]

Well then you only need one drive between lots of machines just take the sides off and plug it in when/if needed then you can have nice flat front panels on all machines

[Gurm]

Yeah, again you're assuming that all the machines will nicely support booting with a floppy set but not present, or from USB.

From my experience, motherboards have gotten LESS tolerant lately, not more.

I have spoken.

- Gurm

[GNEP]

True, true. I just have my BIOS (745 Ultra) set to "floppy seek disabled" and no floppy drive selected - then reset those settings to detect it on the way to booting up with the drive if/when I need it... But not sure how this would work with all mobos - seemed fine on an ECS K7S5A and an ECS K7AMA as well...

[Gurm]

Right, but my brother's fiance's box (i815) shits all over itself without a floppy hooked up.

- Gurm