Bye Bye Floppy...
 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6314251.stm

PCWorld announce they will no longer stock floppy drives/discs! Where am I supposed to store my 1.44mb drivers now?! :p

Decline of an icon though...

In the attic, next to the 5 1/2" bays

I banned that device 2 years ago.

I still have mine for BIOS flashing needs :)

I have one, but haven't used it for a long time. The only reason I use it is the same as Sasqui - I don't think my mobo lets me update from USB, and I haven't bothered to see if I can get it too yet. Flash drives > floppy by a mile - faster, more reliable and bigger.

Mine is still in the system. Couldnt tell you when I last used it though...

Well, this is 1 GOOD THING ABOUT VISTA I have heard about:

You no longer NEED to use Floppy Disks to install 3rd party drivers anymore (for things like SCSI &/or High-End SATA/PATA diskdrive controllers for instance)... pressing "F6" during installation of the OS, near the earliest parts of it.

:)

* I know, I know - not EXACTLY what this topic's about, but it's true from what I heard & DOES regard floppy disk usage.

APK

I agree with this I hated that you still needed a floppy for that in XP.

ditto

I like floppies. Though, when my wife bought me my compaq gaming pc, it didnt come with a floppy, just a flash card reader. Im hoping, and it looks like I wont, need a floppy for my ASUS A8N5X mobo.

FDD... stalwart and reliable when you really need it. an essential bit of kit for the enthusiast who needs to flash from dos using very specific special commands which windows based flashers cant do.

poor floppy guess ill have to stock up now

My new asus doesn't require a floppy either, but I have a serious problem depending on WINDOWS! to stay stable while the program flashes my rom... Mainly because I don't feel like having to order a new bios if something goes wrong, I have already seen it happen... Floppy until the day there is another way that is as stable and error proof.

Maybe what they should do is drop 2 chips on the board, allow you to update online, and then on reboot it verifies the data on the second chip that updated and after verification it re-writes the other bios.

Gigabyte has been doing this forever. Many motherboards have two bios chips, for exactly what you are talking about.

um, i havent used a floppy for that in years on my systems, i just use nlite and make a new windows disk thats got the needed drivers builtin, FAR better then floppy.

also you can use the %oem% folder to store drivers that you cant/dont want to slipstream,

and ket, i agree, tho i read someplace that winfash with commandline changes can flash the same as the dos flasher, havent tryed it, no need, i normaly stick to stock bios unless theres a real need to get moded ones.

this asus board needs TrFc tweaks and i would be happy as could be, whats funny to me is that the tforce550 a board that RETAIL is 1/2 the price of this asus board has better overclocking fetures!!!
higher vcore settings, better memory timings, just allaround a better board!!!!

hell ECS makes one for there highend mobos that jumpers over the original BIOS chips and sets it back to stock

its a top hat flash tool, and i dosnt set it back to stock, you stick that on, boot up remove it and flash a working bios to the crupted bios chip

its called a tophat flasher, nothing new, they been around for years, just that no board maker till ECS bothered(where kool enought) to ship them with the boards that had soldered on bios chips.

and the tophat is just a cheaper way to do dual bios, less complexity on the mobo=less cost per board, AFIK you can flash the tophat with updated bios as well if you leave it on(at least i flashed the tophats (2) i have at work with many bios using various boards so i could fix other boards that had gotten fubard :)

The jumper resets oem values. but if you corrupt your bios that wont work...

See that is the fix! Then you don't have a problem...

Hm I haven't even liked Gigabyte boards well since they swayed me the
wrong way about 8 years ago... Maybe I should give em a shot again.

Go guys! Took my idea before I knew I had it... :D

which is why hotflashing exists, of course, to do that you need a working mobo to hand

Or a rom writer that would always work :)

my thoughts exactly ;)
:toast:

I still have a floppy handy just in case. So what happens to the 3.25 drives? Card readers.

I guess my point was missed: You don't need a floppy in TYPICAL install circumstances/scenarios, as you needed them in before VISTA in most ordinary Windows installs.

I suppose I should have/could have, stated it that way, to avoid "nitpicking"...

APK

P.S.=> Your method's "a way", & I am not discounting it... if it works, it works. I have not tried that before, so, I'll take your word on it that it works (the NLite method you describe - I've heard about the program, but never used it to date)!

Like many folks here, I know that "slipstreaming in" services packs &/or hotfixes PLUS drivers, works, to avoid having to do the F6 install of 3rd party drivers, so your method makes sense as well... apk

Will I be able to get my computer to boot up my sata drives with a card reader? Do internal card readers use ide cables? I say this because I had to use a floppy to get my computer to boot from my sata drives.