Poll: Floppy Drive?

[Impact55]

Do you have a floppy drive in your current system? I've heard many use a boot cd to format/fdisk, is this really effective? I've tried SUOrangeman's BOOTCD and it works on a system that is already up, but I'm curious if it would actually work after freshly hooking all the parts together without the CD being detected before.

 

[office boy]

It may seem like you don't need it, and you might not. I have a lot of friend who laught at my "dorky" floppy drive, but who do they call when they need drivers off a floppy disk, and they can't DL them? or when their botable CD just won't boot?
Your better off with a floppy, but you will almost never use it.

 

[nateholtrop]

not true...I use my floppy drive quite a bit....wait thats my zip drive never mind



Nate

 

[Ponyboy25]

Yup, there's been times when I've lost control of that darn CD drive, and the little old dusty thing called a floppy has save my arse!

 

[Noriaki]

A floppy drive is all of $10
I can't think of a good reason not to put one in.

I use it to boot, I use it to flash my BIOS and I use it for formatting and pqpmagic...I suppose I could use a boot CD..but I don't need to...and I don't see a good reason not to use a floppy drive...
The only possible reason I can think of is for an IRQ...
But I have both my com ports disabled so I have enough IRQs...my IRQ 3 is actually not in use by anything.

 

[cavingjan]

I can't think of a good reason not to cannibalize one from an old sytem. That 5 1/4 & 3 1/2 combo drive from the early 90's still works and keeps going (granted a little slow). Its simply a permanent attachment to that case. I guess I'll have to move it when I do my next upgrade for the server.

 

[jsbush]

I never use my floppy drive except for booting. But my new Abit KT7 motherboard won't boot from floppy! Oh well I'll use a cd.

 

[PowerJoe]

My friend insisted not getting one... He's happy and all, but when someone brings him something on a diskette, he has to go through me!

-PJ

 

[goldboyd]

definatately a floppy drive is still usefull. especially for $10 or so, you cant go wrong. i use it for flashing bios, installing drivers that still come on floppy... and dont forget that older boxes usually dont support booting from cd's so if you ever half to work on an old box, a bootdisk is still necessary

 

[Imaginer]

Lifesaver in times of need. Good little thing for getting a system back to normal when the Cd fails.