Do i3 and Phenom mobos have floppy drive connections?

[JEDI]

I cant live w/o my floppy drive.

the way i make bootable ghost images is to get the boot files from Floppy Drive A:

i havent been in the computer upgrade field in 3years.

do mobos now-a-days still have floppy drive connections?

if not, then whats an easy work around to make bootable ghost images?

 

[Puppies04]

The hardware vendor I use doesn't even sell internal floppy drives anymore . Would one of these satify you? http://www.scan.co.uk/products/freecom-usb-external-floppy-disk-drive-black-%28144%29-retail

 

[douglasb]

USB floppy is about the best you are going to be able to get. What you're trying to do is basically the equivalent of trying to find wooden wagon wheels to put on a new car. For lots of obvious reasons, floppies are considered almost completely dead technology at this point. They're really past the point of even being supported as legacy devices any more.

 

[paperwastage]

http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=Z68%20Pro3-M&cat=Specifications

^ 1155 Z68 matx mobo with floppy, COMM and printer connector. no IDE though

anyways, I've used Clonezilla, and like it more than Ghost

 

[sandorski]

Some do, not sure what percentage though. It certainly is being phased out.

 

[ChippyUK]

Heh isn't the question here how to make devices bootable? I think the OP should know a more modern way to boot from rather than rely on old tech.

The easiest way I know that all modern chipsets support is boot from a USB key. I like that option because of the speed of install and it's handy to grab from a draw.

There is plenty of software to automate this process for you and the cost is minimal.

If your ghost is larger, I suggest a USB/ESATA external hard drive.

 

[Master Shake]

P61 mobo (atx) Fata1ty by Asrock has IDE and fdd

 

[Taft12]

http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=Z68 Pro3-M&cat=Specifications

^ 1155 Z68 matx mobo with floppy, COMM and printer connector. no IDE though

anyways, I've used Clonezilla, and like it more than Ghost

P61 mobo (atx) Fata1ty by Asrock has IDE and fdd

Great finds guys, ASRock to the rescue for legacy I/O!!!

 

[Joseph F]

I wish people would just get with the program and use USB drives. There is no advantage that I can think of to using a floppy as a backup boot device. Nearly every motherboard made within the past 10 years supports USB-booting.

 

[Deleted member 4644]

Floppy booting was relevant about 5-7 years ago for people who needed certain BIOS flash operations.

Today..... it is totally irrelevant.

Spend 5 minutes reading online and you will find a more modern boot method for any imaginable application.

 

[Magic Carpet]

It's pointless to argue what you should or shouldn't be using, because we all have different purposes, skills and habits. There is no single way to get a job done these days.

ASrock is a vivid old-school IO supporter, check 'em out. However, you might have some issues using the onboard controller on modern OSes such as Windows 7. Google around. In my experience, onboard floppy controller didn't properly work in Windows 7 on my ex-AMD-chipset-based system. But I believe, this was an isolated case, however. Don't think the problem is widespread. Most likely, you will be 90% fine. You should be picking up Intel anyway.

Getting a USB floppy would be a wiser investment, in my opinion. Especially, when you can use it across multiple platforms and systems, where otherwise, FDC wouln't have a right to exist.

In my experience, floppy requires less fiddling around when you need to do something basic; for these purposes, USB is no match. I value my time. Let alone the fact, that some of the older computers don't even support USB boot.

Even in 2012, I still prefer flashing my hardware with a combination of floppy & ram disk. Just because it's old, doesn't mean it's bad.

 

[nenforcer]

Does anyone know if its even possible to flash a modern UEFI based firmware motherboard from a bootable DOS formatted 1.44MB floppy drive?

I'm guessing UEFI BIOS's with all of the images surpass the file size limitations of 1.44MB now. BIOS Chips are now, what, at least 8Mb if not 16Mb (2MB) EEPROM?

 

[Magic Carpet]

Does anyone know if its even possible to flash a modern UEFI based firmware motherboard from a bootable DOS formatted 1.44MB floppy drive?

I'm guessing UEFI BIOS's with all of the images surpass the file size limitations of 1.44MB now. BIOS Chips are now, what, at least 8Mb if not 16Mb (2MB) EEPROM?

It is sensibly possible but with non-standard 1.44MB disks, unless of course, you want to use multiple volumes... which would make things unnecessary cumbersome and time-consuming.

There are, certainly better ways to update your UEFI bios. RTFM

 

[Taft12]

Floppy booting was relevant about 5-7 years ago for people who needed certain BIOS flash operations.

Today..... it is totally irrelevant.

Spend 5 minutes reading online and you will find a more modern boot method for any imaginable application.

Not totally irrelevant... Still need one to install Windows XP to a SATA drive set to AHCI (or a RAID controller)

 

[pitz]

There are some Q67 Sandy Bridge boards, IIRC, with floppy connectors and parallel ports.

But seriously...even if you can find a board with such, its really time to look at phasing out the floppy disks.

 

[Joseph F]

Not totally irrelevant... Still need one to install Windows XP to a SATA drive set to AHCI (or a RAID controller)

Windows XP is irrelevant. You can use Windows 7 for a main PC and if you need something more lightweight, for niche purposes, a good Linux distro would serve you well.

 

[alexruiz]

I cant live w/o my floppy drive.

the way i make bootable ghost images is to get the boot files from Floppy Drive A:

i havent been in the computer upgrade field in 3years.

do mobos now-a-days still have floppy drive connections?

if not, then whats an easy work around to make bootable ghost images?

What version of Ghost are you using? I am still using 2003 build 793, and i am assuming you are also using 2003, or probably NGS 8.5 (the corporate equivalent)

You got the suggestion of the USB floppy, which works well. In fact, I think every person in your field should have one, as you never know when you will have to face data stored in floppies.

Personally, my USB floppy is collecting dust. I have several small flash drives (one as small as 16 MB) configured as "bootable" using the HP bootable USB flah drive utility. Just copy your Ghost files and boot from USB. Faster and more portable.

anyways, I've used Clonezilla, and like it more than Ghost

I know this is for another thread, but I am curious about clonezilla. What speed can you hit with clonezilla booting from the recovery environment? Create image, restore from image, and partition copy? How fast does it boot? Can it copy a partition (not image creation) over LAN?

I am still using Ghost 2003 (yes, DOS based) despite its announced death years ago, and I honestly don't see how I am going to substitute. Applications that are very good within windows (Acronis for example) just plain stink if using the recovery environment, as they are slower, take longer to boot and don't have as many features.

"Ghost 2003 cannot handle vista / win 7": Yes it can
"It doesn't support SATA drives":This is mainly motherboard / BIOs dependent, and for those older mobos with poor SATa implementation, that is why we got build 793.
"Cannot write to external storage, there are no DOS drivers for those high speed buses": There are DOS drivers for firewire, USB 2.0. eSATa doesn't need drivers at all, but i am not sure about usb 3.0

Ghost 2003 is very hardware dependent for speed, but even in oder machines, 1000 MB/min is the lowest, and that is when making images. Restoring / copying is quite faster. On modern hard drives, it can do 6000 MB/min in partition copy operations.

However, I already know I will have to change in the mid term, as eSATa will disappear with usb 3.0 mainstream adoption, and the still unsolved issue of creating images to partitions larger than 1TB. So I am all ears

 

[Lazlo Panaflex]

"It doesn't support SATA drives":This is mainly motherboard / BIOs dependent, and for those older mobos with poor SATa implementation, that is why we got build 793.

I've used 2003 for years...just add the -noide flag.

 

[paperwastage]

I know this is for another thread, but I am curious about clonezilla. What speed can you hit with clonezilla booting from the recovery environment? Create image, restore from image, and partition copy? How fast does it boot? Can it copy a partition (not image creation) over LAN?

I am still using Ghost 2003 (yes, DOS based) despite its announced death years ago, and I honestly don't see how I am going to substitute. Applications that are very good within windows (Acronis for example) just plain stink if using the recovery environment, as they are slower, take longer to boot and don't have as many features.

"Ghost 2003 cannot handle vista / win 7": Yes it can
"It doesn't support SATA drives":This is mainly motherboard / BIOs dependent, and for those older mobos with poor SATa implementation, that is why we got build 793.
"Cannot write to external storage, there are no DOS drivers for those high speed buses": There are DOS drivers for firewire, USB 2.0. eSATa doesn't need drivers at all, but i am not sure about usb 3.0

Ghost 2003 is very hardware dependent for speed, but even in oder machines, 1000 MB/min is the lowest, and that is when making images. Restoring / copying is quite faster. On modern hard drives, it can do 6000 MB/min in partition copy operations.

However, I already know I will have to change in the mid term, as eSATa will disappear with usb 3.0 mainstream adoption, and the still unsolved issue of creating images to partitions larger than 1TB. So I am all ears

why don't you try Clonezilla? All you need is a USB Flash drive or DVD or PXE boot for clonezilla, and space somewhere (secondary internal HDD, USB flash drive, firewire HDD, samba/nfs/ssh server).... for me ,booting on USB takes less than 1 minutes I believe....

some of the stuff you have to learn. If you know enough linux, you're golden. It has a "GUI" step-by-step prompt on what you want to do (save entire disk->image, specific partitions->image,

(screenshot is older version of clonezilla. newer version has more features)
http://clonezilla.org/screenshots.php?in_path=/00_Clonezilla

On my i5 2500k desktop, I can hit 9GB/minu saving my V+100 96GB Kingston onto an somewhat-empty/defragged 1TB WD Black. Verifying the image (meaning reading from my 1TB WD Black ~ 12GB/min). Image is compresed via gzip parallel, so the image takes < 50&#37; of my actual used space. Took me < 20 minutes to backup my entire computer including image verification and MD5 hashing for the image

On my Dell M1330 laptop (T8300 2.4ghz), saving my V+100 96GB Kingston onto a USB 2.0 HDD takes 3GB/min (right up to the speed limit of USB 2.0), compressed via gzip parallel

On my Dell mini 10v laptop, (that time I didn't have a spare USB HDD), tried saving to a SAMBA share. speed was ~5mb/s, compression parallel gzip, but the laptop had an Atom N270 which would have affected the speed

Haven't tried booting/copying over LAN, since I have no reason to and I only have 1 gigabit desktop (laptops are 10/100)... maybe I can try later

I dual-boot ubuntu + W7, so had to find something that works for ext4 / grub2

Create another thread if you want to talk more (PM me the thread so I can repy)

 

[Ratman6161]

I think any imaging software out there today and for a long time in the past would give you a way to create a bootable recovery CD. I used to do that with Ghost 2003 and now do it with Acronis true image. I have my images stored on an external USB hard disk. Just boot from the cd and load the image from the usb hard disk.