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View Full Version : USB floppies, how work on desktop PC?

Clevor
08-31-04, 08:46 PM
I went thru all the trouble to hook up an Epox 4PDA2+ to my Vapochill XE and now I find out the floppy is dead. Well with my worse 2.40C, the thing boots up at 315 fsb at 1.48 VCORE so I wanna play around with it a little before I take it out. It's a bitch formatting and partitioning the HD and running Memtest w/o a floppy though.

What about a USB floppy? How does it work? Do I just plug it in and it works right from bootup??? Will I need to disable floppy settings in the BIOS? What about WinXP? Need any drivers?
Xaotic
09-01-04, 10:44 AM
Most BIOSes wil recognize and configure USB FDDs automatically. Sometimes you may need to disable the onboard FDD controller to get the USB FDD to read as A:. XP will not need drivers and configure automatically.
Clevor
09-01-04, 05:16 PM
Most BIOSes wil recognize and configure USB FDDs automatically. Sometimes you may need to disable the onboard FDD controller to get the USB FDD to read as A:. XP will not need drivers and configure automatically.

I tend to agree with you. Look at USB mice and keyboards, I just plug them in and they work right at boot up and clear into Windows; though they might need drivers to work optimum there.

There were 2-3 of the same posts as mine on a search, but nobody had the hard fast answer. Yours is the most helpful so far.

In addition, I am using the latest 865P/875P boards and they have the option to boot from some other device. In any case, I figured out how to make bootable CD-ROMS so I am using that. I just have to figure how to move the ChillControl files for the Vapochill onto a CD. But I'll get a USB floppy anyway for emergencies like this.
Xaotic
09-01-04, 05:29 PM
Most higher level CD burning apps can burn a boot CD that uses an image created by a bootable floppy. This would seem to be the easiest way.
Clevor
09-01-04, 06:09 PM
Most higher level CD burning apps can burn a boot CD that uses an image created by a bootable floppy. This would seem to be the easiest way.

That's what I did with Memtest86. Took me a while to figure it out. But you burn the ISO file provided as an image file using Nero. It doesn't work if you add it as a file and create a bootable CD using a floppy. The latter protocol worked for me to create a bootable CD version of the Win98 Startup disk.