I love building PC’s. The smell of thermal grease, opening boxes of new components, building a barebone PC is just something I enjoy doing. My latest project was a Apevia X-QPACK cube case I wanted to setup to try and reduce some space.
After installing all the components and firing the box up to install Windows XP Service Pack 2, I realize during the install that I would need to supply boot up drivers (hitting F6 and the beginning of the XP installation’s text based setup) Of course, I didn’t have a floppy drive in my case. I tried copying the drivers for my AMD SATA controller to a USB thumbdrive…no dice. Then I remembered the swappable floppy that comes with my Dell Latitude 620, what’s nice about this drive is that it has a mini-USB plug on it. You can connect it via USB port and access the drive. Of course, USB floppy drives aren’t supported in the text based portion of the installation.
Eventually I had to just give in and install a floppy drive. I looked into slipstreaming the SATA drivers to the installation media but it seemed like more work then I felt like doing – installing a floppy takes about as long the actual CD burning process. Luckily I had a floppy drive sitting in an old PC I had laying around (it was actually harder locating a floppy disk in my house)
Long story short….when can we officially kill the floppy drive off? I know Vista/2008 have support for SATA controllers, and support installing drivers from a thumb drive (so does Mac OSX)
Annoying…ok, I’m done complaining