Floppy Woes

[Methious]

Here's a "Duh" moment for ya, went to Wal Mart to pick up some stuff, wanted to flash Bios on my machine so I got a 10 pack imation 1.44 preformatted floppys. Got back home put the stuff away, popped open the floppy pack, put one in the drive, went to drag the bios bin file to it, says not formatted, refuses to format it. So I go through 10 disks all same result. I switched to an Asus black cable when I recased last week so I went and got the old round floppy cable that was working figuring bad cable, same thing, put in a new floppy drive same thing. Went and found an old floppy disk, stuck it in and the file dragged right to it. All 10 Imation disks bad, so i retried each disk and sure enough every one failed to read.

Hour and a half later 3 cables, 2 replacement floppy drives, 11 disks I flashed bios on the original floppy drive, with the original asus cable, and all I can say is:

DUHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

[vicaphit]

Floppies are like 8-tracks now. If you can do the same thing with a flash drive or CD I would try that instead.

[Methious]

Yea they are like 8 tracks, my flash drive went south I think, machine recognizes it then when you try to access it you get errors. Didn't want to risk it with one of my mp3/flash drive players. When I get down to wally world this week I'll pick up one. The only reason I keep a floppy is when loading a raid array XP asks for the raid drivers on floppy. Hope Vista is past that, when I loaded my Vista array I fell back on habit and used a floppy. Old habits die hard.

It's amazing the number of drive types over the last 25 years, among the odd stuff I have laying around, zip 100 internal, zip 100 parallel (given to me), buncha floppy drives, stack of cdroms, LS 120 super floppy (try to find media for that one), a working 5 1/4 floppy, various usb external drives, and looking to an external dvd burner. Most of the stuff never used, but when you do need one it's usually the only thing that will do it.

Lots of customers want their pictures off before reload, then say the machine is jacked enough to not recognize a usb external or flash drive,and the cd burner refuses to burn, go through the trouble of removing the HD and connect it to a working machine or zip drive them parallel. Most of the time I try and avoid connecting them to a working machine (to many people let the virus definition run out, or virus protection non-existent). Since data retrieval is a few extra bucks in pocket it pays to keep the stuff.

[kenc51]

You can slipstream the RAID drivers...........