[lug] External USB floppy drives and driver diskettes

[karl horlen]

> 2) HP makes a windows app that will allow you to
> take a dd/rawrite image 
> of a floppy and put it on a usb stick.  Whether or
> not you can boot from 
> a usb device is a function of the BIOS of the
> machine.  I believe most 
> recent machines will.  Older machines sometimes call
> the usb boot device 
> ZIP100 or similar.

IIRC, this is why I never went down this road when it
I came up against it last time.  I kept finding posts
about this hp utility but I could only find it on
third party sites or postings that I wasn't
comfortable downloading from.  I wasn't sure if it was
trustworthy or not.  And by the time I was finished
doing a preliminary investigation, I could have opened
up a pc and transferred the HW.

Have you ever actually used it?  Do you have a copy of
it and instructions?  

> 3) Whether you can boot from a usb device is a
> function of the BIOS. 

Although it would be nice to boot from it, in the
cases I presented above, I'm asking more or less if it
will just "be seen" by the installer which has already
booted from CD or DVD rom.  I guess it depends if the
installer has a driver that supports it or not.  Or if
the BIOS is smart enough to see it as if it were a
vanilla internally connected floppy?

Booting from it would of course be determined by the
BIOS.

> The only time I've needed a floppy disk in the last
> 3 years was to flash 

It is indeed very infrequent.  But when it does happen
it's annoying.

> everything to a floppy disk."  Very gradually, the
> bios writing dept of 
> the big vendors are starting to process that the
> hardware side of the 
> house isn't shipping floppy drives any more.

They're really behind on this one.  USB sticks are
today's floppies.  BIOS, driver and other floppy based
updates should be made to work from USB flash drives.
I can't think of any excuses why they shouldn't.


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