3.5 inch floppy disk death

So when is the last time anyone has used a 3.5 inch floppy for it's intended or unintended purpose ?

I can't remember exactly the date but less than a year ago I had to use one to install windows XP. My copy is too old to have SATA drivers so I had to use one during the install process so I could install XP onto a SATA drive. It was hard to believe I couldn't use a USB drive but I guess XP is that old.

I remember having to dig through the box of old computer stuff I should throw away and find a disk that had some obsolete program on it and the floppy drive. Had to try a couple disks to find a working one.

It's not really that old. (I mean, it is, but …) Floppies were already becoming uncommon when XP was released, in mid-to-late 2001. For example, Apple had stopped shipping computers with floppy drives in 1998. They're usually on the forefront of that sort of thing, but, still, that's three years. Dell stopped shipping floppy drives by default by 2003.

In short, there was no excuse for the XP install system to fail to support USB floppy drives, or other USB mass storage devices.

I can't even remember the last time. I had a home network and file server in 1998, and by then floppies were already pretty useless for moving data around. Only purpose they served back then was as a boot disk to load CD-ROM drivers prior to a Windows 9x install. By the time XP was getting old enough to not have common storage drivers built in, I was already transitioning to OS X.

Am I remembering incorrectly, or was memtest86 only available in a floppy-bootable version for a while? If so, that's the last time for me.

I used one a couple of years ago to update the BIOS on an old PowerEdge server.

I had a shock with that same server a couple of months ago. It liveslived in my garage and the drives started failing at the same time that I was having networking problems. So I rushed out to the garage to try and save some data that I knew wasn't backedup.

When I arrived at the server with my external hard drive, it took me several minutes to understand that it really didn't have a USB port anywhere

About 4-weeks ago. To apply a firmware update to an SSD.

Cheers

I ripped open a floppy two weeks ago to try using the disk material as an IR filter. I retired floppy drives from my Windows systems in 1999 I believe.

One of my Dell servers is about 2 years old. XP SP2 but I still need to use a floppy to update the BIOS...

Why not use a bootable USB key for updating the BIOS?

Because many older machines with USB won't boot from USB (even some that are supposed to be able to).

Unexposed and developed slide film is supposed to work for that as well. Large format slide film would work best- you would have a nice big 4x5 (or 8x10) inch piece you could cut to size.

Yeah, I know about the film as well. The only thing I had handy were a couple of floppies though, so I thought I'd try them out first. Unfortunately they didn't block the wavelengths and spurious noise I was hoping for. At least in my limited test. I'm actually looking block visible light and some IR, to filter out some noise produced by some CCFL backlights and Plasma screens (for customers).

I've also got some 5.25" floppies around that I haven't touched in over 20 years. I wonder if they'll still read - I'd love to pull some content off them (Commodore 64 format).

I just the other weekend used a floppy for the same purpose. I would have used film, except for the fact that I haven't a clue where to buy some and haven't actually seen any in at least 10 years. As it is, I had to grab a floppy from my wife as I don't have any of those, either.

I used one last week, and will be using it again. It's on a 'very' expensive Agilent spectrum analyser and it's the only way to get screen grabs and other data off it. Unless you want to use the GBIP to parallel converter, which is another exercise in frustration....

I think these floppy disk tiles would have been more popular 15 years ago.

I found this in the basement a few days ago

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/MEX-Xo2sN6MKISCdbQZx2A?feat=directlink

1 of 15

I remember playing the games with 15 disks. Eventually one of the disks would start to go and you would put the bad disk in and just pray as the floppy drive started making horrible seek noises. Then you knew it was all over.

I use one about monthly. When one of our encrypted laptops has a problem that is one of the tools to get the data back.

Doh! I'd forgotten that.

I recently noticed that there's a disk-drive-to-usb adapter available for the ABB robot controllers I work with.
I haven't looked to see if anyone makes that sort of thing for a PC.

I've still got somewhere a Mac Plus, which can boot MacOS and then run Microsoft Word all from a single 800K floppy.

Peter

I can't find it anymore but SysInternals used to have a utility to format a floppy disk to have a NTFS file system. That was a fun little trick. The only problem was you only had 500KB free after the NTFS overhead. Floppy with file permissions and encryption anyone?

Yes, a long time ago, just for fun. At that time, decreased capacity was too a high price compared to the benefit of encryption/permissions. In any case, I remember already having some Iomega Zip disks around when NTFS floppies became an option...

If it is the same utility that I remember then it just wrote a preprepared image to the floppy instead of using the OS routines to actually do the formatting since they would refuse to work on a drive that small. The author of the utility had to do some patching of NT to actually create that image as well.