Bit of an odd one....

Peerzy · 21 Feb 2011 at 22:57

I have a PC which I need to build to a network - to do this you use a floppy disk. No problems so I grab my USB floppy drive and power it up and start getting issues. Phone the support guys who say the type of network I'm building onto and the disc type I'm using hardly ever works with USB floppy drives.

Brilliant so I've got spare floppy drives everywhere I'll throw one into the PC just to build it then get rid - one problem my motherboard doesn't have the right data connection (that cable that looks like a slightly smaller IDE cable).

Urgh - I was expecting to be able to buy a SATA floppy drive or something for a fiver but can't find anywhere that even sells them, nor any converters or anything like that.

Any ideas?

kae2 · 21 Feb 2011 at 23:29

No chance of using a bootable USB??

Breeny · 22 Feb 2011 at 00:20

I should imagine you'd be able to put the PXE driver on a CD?

Peerzy · 22 Feb 2011 at 22:24

kae2 said:
No chance of using a bootable USB??

Gonna try that, cheers.

Breeny said:
I should imagine you'd be able to put the PXE driver on a CD?

Hmmmm explain? Needs to be able to write data back to the device so surely a CD won't work?

J.B · 22 Feb 2011 at 23:28

What do you mean build to a network? More details please

Shouldnt really need a floppy drive for anything any more.

Peerzy · 23 Feb 2011 at 00:06

Building to a school network (Edutec Classmaster 4 - but it's used for RM CC3 and other networks).

You pop the disc in, give the station a name, the disc does its magic, installs some DOS LAN drivers then pulls an image of the OS over the network and installs it before taking packages etc...

Breeny · 23 Feb 2011 at 14:19

J.B. - I should imagine it's much like Symantec Ghost? But no doubt RM have over-complicated the process.

Good point about the CD, doh.

I've just been reading on tomshardware.com that there are no SATA floppy drives available as they use a completely different 'standard' They don't divulge into which 'standard' that is though.

Did you get any luck with booting from a USB stick?

Peerzy · 24 Feb 2011 at 12:39

I use RM at one site and it works perfectly fine, this is Edutec Classmaster which is pants!

Effectively though you have a PC which is dead, blue screening, not loading Windows, whatever the problem is providing it's software and not hardware. You plug a USB Floppy in, boot into Win98, give it a PC name and location, it uses DOS LAN drivers off the floppy, connects to the network then pulls down an image of XP and then takes packages (applications) one by one.

Any sort of PC problem it takes 1 hour to do an entire rebuild from start to finish so it's so much quicker to do this than actually spend ages sorting out small problems!

Bootable USB didn't work either, exactly the same issue.

I'm gonna install XP normally, join it to the domain, and then I've gotta run a few scripts and do a few things and apparently it should build onto the network that way fine.