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End of an era

IronWing

IronWing

No Lifer
With the death of my PC this morning, I no longer have any method of reading a 3.5" floppy. Neither my new PC nor any of the machines at work have 3.5" drives. Oddly enough, I still have a functional Zip 250 reader.
 
I haven't had a 3.5" drive in my home pc in years. I have one in my work pc, but can't remember the last time I ever used it.
 
Yeah, same here - despite the fact that my new motherboard does still have a floppy connector. 1) I didn't have a cable that'd reach the full distance, around my videocard and goddamn enormous Mugen2 CPU heatsink. 2) I didn't feel like trying to route the cable through the densely-packed cluster of cables that's already in there. Even with SATA drives, it's still pretty packed.

The main thing I've needed floppy disks for was installing hard drive controller drivers during a WinXP install.
 
yeah, since everything boots from USb and CD now there's pretty much no reason to use floppy drives.
 
i think i've got a USB floppy drive somewhere around here. was required for examsoft (stupid piece of garbage program that was)
 
CallMeJoe said:
5.25". I have a PC at work that I use for avionics diagnostics that still has a 5.25" drive.
Click to expand...

My bad, couldn't remember. I don't open that drawer much. Last time I did I found love letters I had no knowledge of from 1998. The drawer is some kind of dimensional portal to an alternate timeline, the contents shift from time to time. I'm pretty sure there were some GI Joes in there last I looked too.
 
I've been transferring the same 3.5" floppy drive between my computers for the past decade now. I actually don't even know if the thing still works...
 
It's been at least 8 years since I used one. Probably longer. I had a CD burner by then. I also bought an early compact flash reader/writer around that time for cheap. Had an 8mb card for moving document files around. My mom's desktop still has a floppy drive. She needs a new computer. ^_^
 
Back in Athlon and Geforce days I kept a 5 1/4 running just for the halibut. I had an extra drive bay that was being used, and nature abhors a vacuum. Got a nice painted black and got it operational. Never really used it. I think it came with a copy of Kings Quest, but a roomate managed to ruin the discs before I had a chance to load it.
 
I still have a 3.5 floppy in one of my machines. You never know when you might want to transfer a megabyte and change at a really slow speed, just for hell of it.
 
Jeff7 said:
Yeah, same here - despite the fact that my new motherboard does still have a floppy connector. 1) I didn't have a cable that'd reach the full distance, around my videocard and goddamn enormous Mugen2 CPU heatsink. 2) I didn't feel like trying to route the cable through the densely-packed cluster of cables that's already in there. Even with SATA drives, it's still pretty packed.

The main thing I've needed floppy disks for was installing hard drive controller drivers during a WinXP install.
Click to expand...

That's the only time I've ever encountered a need for a floppy disk - that and for boot-disks of other software at that time - it's all moved past floppy now, thankfully.

I actually still have an FDD in my current pc - it just sits there all lonely, not even completely installed. It's in the drive rails, with the data connector connected to the motherboard - but the motherboard and something else required the only two PSU connectors that serve as FDD connectors. I was like - wait a minute, I can't power this thing.
Still never disconnected the data cable or took the FDD out of the machine.
Four years and running... it's there to look good. 🙂
 
destrekor said:
That's the only time I've ever encountered a need for a floppy disk - that and for boot-disks of other software at that time - it's all moved past floppy now, thankfully.
...
Click to expand...
Also good for recovering from a botched BIOS flash, assuming the motherboard in question has some sort of very basic commands built in to it. In the one instance where I needed that capability, the motherboard needed a floppy disk in drive A:, with a BIOS file of a specific name.

Let's see how long I can go without needing to hook up the old drive again. 🙂
 
Jeff7 said:
Also good for recovering from a botched BIOS flash, assuming the motherboard in question has some sort of very basic commands built in to it. In the one instance where I needed that capability, the motherboard needed a floppy disk in drive A:, with a BIOS file of a specific name.

Let's see how long I can go without needing to hook up the old drive again. 🙂
Click to expand...

Many these days can use USB flash drives or card readers in lieu of floppies. (I recently had to do that myself)
 
Demon-Xanth said:
Many these days can use USB flash drives or card readers in lieu of floppies. (I recently had to do that myself)
Click to expand...
Good.


Now I've just got to wait until I can get a BIOS with a mouse-driven GUI, like I had in a Supermicro board I used with my first Pentium II system - P6SLA. Good old 440LX chipset. 64MB of lightning-fast PC66 RAM. 🙂
 
I have a 3.5" just in case in a drawer at work. I officespaced my last 3.5" drive years ago (like 2003). If the MB can't handle booting from a USB stick OR god forbid is too old to handle CD-boots, into the bin - its too damn old.
 
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