Demise of the Floppy

[flipdoubt]

In light of Dell's decision to include floppy drives on request only and their approval of USB key chain devices for removable storage, I have a question: can you boot from these devices?

Or, to all you Mac-abees, what do you do if and when you need to boot from a device other than your hard drive?

[Still Shady]

well you use your CDROM to boot your machine much faster than a floppy! :-/

So just burn an MS-DOS to CD or whatever you want!

[jason]

I doubt that you can boot from a USB device. Generally you need a driver for the system to recognise what the device is, and the only way to load a driver is to have a running OS.

I don't think I've seen a bootable floppy on a Mac in many years. Generally, when one of our Macs won't start, we boot from a CD, such as Norton Untilities. All of our Macs have floppies, but again, they're USB floppies, and need a driver. Most PC's have bootable CD ROM drives these days as well. In fact, recent Windows versions haven't shipped with the startup floppy that they used to come with, and it is still possible to get running on a clean hard drive without having to do anything special.

I honestly can't remember the last time I uised my floppy drive on my PC at work, but I just suffered a Windows crash at home this weekend, and that boot disk is what saved me. Even though I rarely use that drive, I personally won't be parting with it any time soon.

--Jason

[hobbes747]

On PCs, the latest motherboards let you choose which device you want to boot from in the BIOS.

If I was a general user (I build my own), I would never never never buy a PC without getting/owning a Windows CD if I planned on using Windows. That is such a derf idea. Apparently Windows doesn't use their own OS.

[flipdoubt]

Hmmm, I can boot from my USB floppy. It's an option in the BIOS.

[jason]

Originally posted by flipdoubt
Hmmm, I can boot from my USB floppy. It's an option in the BIOS.

This must be a newer option that's being included in BIOS's. I know my motherboard doesn't support it, but its going on two years old now--a virtual dinosaur! I can see why mfrs would start including that type of support, though, as USB devices become more and more popular.

--Jason

[Joshua Clinard]

Iv'e got one of the keychain USB memory sticks. It's great, and it holds 128MB. Got it from buy.com. It's called the cyclone. I love it. I don't go anywhere without it.

[CeleronXL]

Ah yes, the demise of the floppy. I personally think it's a bad idea to remove it. One thing that they are saying is that the small USB drives will be taking over (previously stated, but I'm getting at something here). A problem with that is that one of these USB things costs around $15 for each one. If you lose it, you're out 15 bucks. On the other hand, if you lose a floppy, big deal (unless it had important information on it), just get another 25 cent floppy disk to use instead.

[lookout]

I think the timing of this announcement is OK myself, as older machines and OS's that didn't provide native support for USB are quickly disappearing. Most software now ships on CD. It's not that often that you see programs on floppies anymore.

The Dell announcement that I read made it clear that you still have the option to add a floppy back in if you like. It's just not standard on some of their machines. It's not like the connection on the motherboard has vanished, although that may happen yet.

IMHO, the only things floppies have going for them are their legacy support, and their cost effectiveness when the storage requirements are small. They are neither cheap nor convenient for storing large amounts of data. Program and document bloat of recent years have pretty much made them useless for today's storage needs. The storage capacity just isn't big enough.

[Still Shady]

Today's technology doesn't require floppy anymore. We have to face the fact that the floppy era is over. I feel bad about it but technology is leaping ahead, we cannot afford to get ourself stuck in the past where now is the future!

[flipdoubt]

Floppies are also very good at transferring viruses from one machine to another. For this reason, I don't have a floppy drive on my home-brewed machine, lest a neighbor wants to print a resume or something. I just pop in the USB floppy that came with my laptop.

[lookout]

Yes, that's true, especially with boot sector viruses. That's one reason I normally disabled the floppy boot option in the bios, figuring I could always turn it back on again when I needed it. That's coupled with recently updated virus protection software.

Viral infections are still a problem with any removable media of course (or programmable memory for that matter), but the ease of writing to a floppy and their common usage made them one of the primary means of transporting computer viruses in the past. Today the Internet is the primary battlefield.

[clio]

Yeah, but school needs to catch on and get rid of floppy drives. Only the newer machines have CD burners so we can use CDRWs. In general though, I just email myself files back and forth between school and home.

[CeleronXL]

I'd like to see a floppy that can be read/written in current floppy drives that holds a lot more space. We have the technology to do so, but we don't. Zip drives don't count - they're way too expensive, and not really that much like floppies.

[jason]

There are LS-120 drives that can take either regular 1.44 Mb floppies or 120 Mb disks, but they never really caught on. Personally, I prefer Zip, since that's what everyone uses at work. Lately, though, if i need files at home, I put them on a share and then access the share through the VPN. That works great.

--Jason