I just got done performing surgery on my computer. The motherboard was only attached by two screws, and they were both at the top of the board. This was causing it to make weird vibraty noises, which I’ve ignored for a good long time; but recently they’ve gotten really annoying. So hopefully that’s fixed.
Anyway, now the floppy drive’s light is constantly on. I don’t really mind it, and I’m pretty sure the cable’s just on backwards or something. Besides, when does one use a floppy these days?
Is there another gadget that I can stick in there? Perhaps some kind of fan?
I pretty much burn a CD when I want to carry data with me, because I know that it will work where I’m going. As for putting it back on the CD? Well, not so easy!
Flash Drives and CDs pretty much dictacted the death of floppys for me. I now INSIST that every new computer I buy doesn’t come with one of those useless pieces of crap. I now have 3 computer without floppys, but none of them has anything usefull in it’s place. The case I got them with has a sort of floppy-only facade, with corresponding slot and button, so I couldn’t fit anything else there even if I wanted to.
joazito: Heh. You must not have been computing very much before the advent of CD-ROMs if you think floppy drives are ‘useless pieces of crap’. I have so much data on 3.5" disks I really do need a functional floppy drive in my new computers.
Plus, while some new machines can boot from USB drives, those which can’t are guaranteed to be able to boot from a floppy. And being able to boot from something other than the hard drive is essential, as far as I’m concerned.
I have been computing since the times of the spectrum. I loathe floppy drives because they’re very unreliable. I’ve recently thrown away hundreds of old floppy disks with hundreds of programs on them… I spent about an hour trying to find something worth keeping but in the end I didn’t find anything.
Of corse if you have an old PC that requires floppys for booting or that doesn’t have a CD drive or network you need floppys, but that doesn’t apply to today’s PCs.
And yet, I just built a computer, and the mobo had some drivers that came on floppy. I needed to basically yank the 3.5 out of my old system and use it in the new one in order to get the thing up and running. So, they still have uses. And, in the university world they still come in handy. Both of the schools I’m nominally involved with are using systems that will not recognize USB flash drives inserted into the USB ports; some security thing I imagine. So, the best way to transfer word documents and such in a tangible form (ie, not e-mail) is a 3.5" floppy.
I’ve got too many disks and I never seem to have the time to go through all of them. Think piles and piles.
joazito, I’ll admit that they are old technology and are laughably unreliable.
To my mind, however, my PC is my domain, and I don’t like to get rid of technology just because it’s out of fashion or has been replaced by something new that’s usually very expensive and not well-supported or well-standardized. I get good use out of my floppy drives, and even though I have largely replaced floppes with my USB drive in day-to-day usage there’s no reason to abandon them altogether.
Not in my experience. USB drives are higher-capacity, either cheaper or not much more expensive, smaller, more reliable, and more universally supported.
with many profanities, I learned why floppies are still necessary.
When i built my new system I got two SATA hard drives and RAIDed them together. I went to install Windows XP and immediately found out why a floppy is needed…
Windows needs extra drivers to find SATA hard drives. It will only look for those drivers, yep, you guessed it, on A: – a floppy drive. Thats it, peroid. No floppy, no installation of Windows. (yes, I know that there are ways to prep the system initially with the drivers, so you don’t really need the floppy, but I learned that afterwards, and its a pain.)
I agree. And this essentially means there is a shortcut between +5V and mass which should be removed as soon as possible before other (more important parts) of the mainboard get damaged.
Okay, I just took out the ribbon cable that connects the floppy to the board. It’s a pain in the ass getting it on there either way, and I plain and simple don’t need a /dev/fd0.
There are a variety of devices you can install in a 3.5" drive bay; probably the most useful of these would be a multi-format card reader (I installed a unit thsat includes a floppy drive but also includes card readers for the common formats). Or you could install a front panel that exposes some of the connections normally tucked away around the back of the machine; there are quite a few to choose from and they offer all kinds of different selections out of such possibilities as audio sockets, USB, firewire, joystick, serial and parallel and PS/2 ports.
Despite the fact that this conjures up the image of some old geezer with wild eyes and scraggly hair ranting about the end of the world, it has a grain of truth.
I spent considerable time in the early 80s putting a collection of folksong lyrics and chords into a standalone AES word processor. Easy to archive, easy to edit.
Now all I need is a computer with a drive that will take an 8-inch floppy disk. :rolleyes: