Hurrah, flippin' things always corrupting (not that I lost much coursework in Uni days thanks to saving on about five of the things!)

Telegraph | Business | PC World announces the end of the floppy disk

I still have them on my desktops and I also bought a USB floppy drive for my laptop. Yes, the storage capacity is tiny in modern terms but for backing up an important file then I still use them (obviously I make more than one back up!)

I havent use one in years now, thats mainly becuase my home latop and work pc do not have the drives in them.

The USB pin now rules the roost.

Floppy disk?? :confused:

What is this magic you speak of?

I used mine last night to do a fresh install of windows XP.

It's a motherboard with SATA drivers that needs them loading from a floppy drive.

I don't bother having it connected all the time though , it's sat in a desk drawer again now.

Fortunately Vista has SATA drivers already included

The SATA controllers on my intel machines are picked up by the XP setup thank god... I hate messing about with drivers at install time.

I thought most motherboards still require a floppy to update BIOS?

I thought most motherboards still require a floppy to update BIOS?

Been doing this from within windows for years

HTH

Doesn't always work from windows though

The problem is going away in fairness & a lot of boards can boot off a CDR with the update on it too now.

A lot of my older PCs still need FDDs though.

Have to say without the humble floppy my new pcs at home wouldnt be workable. The bios on the motherboard wouldnt recognise the processors correctly and the sata drivers had to come from floppy as well. Basically I couldnt get as far as windows booting without first flashing the bios. And not tot he latest version either Took 4 different versions before I found one that worked in a stable manner.

The Floppy disk might have outlived its usefullness for day to day use, but until they make Flash memory a default bootable device it still has its uses as saviour of the non booting system. Vista might ahve improved the sata situation but I dont see it curing the woefull state of bios revisions for motherboards, When building a system its not uncommon to have to flash the bios before you can get windows to install :(

I'm old enough to have worked with hall sorts of floppies, from the old 8" 360kb ones onwards.

Time moves on, though.

Phil

Doesn't always work from windows though

The problem is going away in fairness & a lot of boards can boot off a CDR with the update on it too now.

A lot of my older PCs still need FDDs though.

All the ones i've tried from windows have worked no probs... even on my really old Gigabyte skt7 mobo.

Guess I'm just lucky then

I downloaded the Hitachi hard drive repair tool the other week... small ISO file burnt to a cd-rw boots up fine and works great! Just need Maxtor to follow Hitachi's lead now

I'm old enough to have worked with hall sorts of floppies, from the old 8" 360kb ones onwards.

Time moves on, though.

Phil

First company I worked for still had 8" floppies . I also remember how much easier things were with dual floppy systems over single floppy systems, before we had hard drives . and before we started worrying about conventional expanded and extended memory

We had some systems that used 8inch floppys when I was an apprentice.

We still use 720K Floppies on our wire eroder machines at work. It doesnt accept 1.44mb ones.

We only have about 5 left out of about 10 we bought 2 years ago.

There as rare as rocking horse **** to get hold of.

There may be a way round that...

have you tried taking a 1.44 one and putting some epoxy resin in the hole in the bottom right corner (label side facing you flap pointing up) fill that hole with somre resin and then try formatting it to 720k

I remember many moons ago a cheap way to get HD disks which were double the price of SD disks was to buy SD disks and drill that lug out, the computer would then recognise the disk as a HD disk and you could use it at 1.44mb. I dont know if modern operating systems even support 720k 3.5" disks or if you would need access to an old system to format to that capacity, or even if simply covering the hole would work...

Its very possible modern drives arent setup to recognise the difference between 720k and 1.44mb.

Tested That theory works on a very old machine running windows 98 doesnt work under windows XP however windows xp was able to read a 720k converted floppy and write to it just not format at that capacity, I am assuming its a oversight on microsfots part to not allow the formatting to 720k option. But if you have windows 98 or earlier on a machine you can convert your 1.44mb disks in this manner and extend your machines life.

Had a nice sideline doing this in reverse I used to buy bulk old covermount floppys which were SD then relabel them convert them to HD and selling them on at half the retail price That was of course back when the "new" 1.44mb disks were new and expensive

Bootable floppy still required for some firmware upgrades on some of our servers, so will be with us for a while yet.

I'm in the middle of moving offices and spent last Friday cleaning out the junk the previous occupant left behind. Three commercial wheelie-bins full :eek: 8 inch floppies, quarter inch tape cartridges, software and manuals from 20-30 years ago. Thankfully we pitched all the half inch tape reels last year!

I said RIP to the floppy when I discovered viagra

Should have kept some of those floppys as an industrial heritage thing.

Thanks ugluk for the info and PM. Ill give this a try.

Let me know how it goes if you cant find a machine to format them I can convert some here get them formatted and sent up.

Tested That theory works on a very old machine running windows 98 doesnt work under windows XP however windows xp was able to read a 720k converted floppy and write to it just not format at that capacity, I am assuming its a oversight on microsfots part to not allow the formatting to 720k option. But if you have windows 98 or earlier on a machine you can convert your 1.44mb disks in this manner and extend your machines life.

Had a nice sideline doing this in reverse I used to buy bulk old covermount floppys which were SD then relabel them convert them to HD and selling them on at half the retail price That was of course back when the "new" 1.44mb disks were new and expensive

Your right Windows XP will not format a floppy to 720KB

There is some software available here (scroll to bottom of page for FMT) that should do the job.

So you should be able to covert disks using the above method and format to 720kb in XP

We still have to use them, the state of the art VoIP telephone system we install has the license files shipped on Floppys.

It's normally when you get to site you realise that you have forgotten your USB floppy drive