Floppy drive still needed to set up RAID?

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Sorry if this is a silly question or has been asked before.

I'm helping a family member of a friend to put together a new system at the weekend and he's considering not installing a floppy drive as they seem to be redundant these days.

I just wondered though if this will cause problems with setting up the RAID drivers in XP (when you press F6 during installation)?

Thanks for any help ;)
 
I believe XP will require F6 drivers for RAID, Vista can sometimes do it without drivers...but obviously downloaded drivers tend to 'work' better than the default ones supplied...

If they do not want a floppy driver...perhaps look at getting a external one?
 
Thanks Delvis, thats what I was thinking.

We could get an external floppy just to set up the drivers then store it away somewhere, far tidier than having a floppy installed the system which never gets used.
 
Vista can browse all attached storage for raid drivers..


so USB stick, hard drives, floppy, CD-drive..

Whatever medium you have the textmode driver on :)

(as long as it isn't on a raid volume ;))
 
misterPK said:
Or there's always the option of a floppy drive and card reader combo if you want it.

PK!
Click to expand...

Yeap I have one of these bought from the MM. It's a good bit of kit and when the floppy is needed I attach the cable.

Though for Vista I didn't need any RAID drivers which was a surprise. About time too.
 
Probably the best thing about Vista in all honesty ;)

If you use a usb floppy, you 'might' have a problem with the O/S install not reading from certain floppy drives...If so, we have a little fix at work that I could throw along to you if the time comes.
 
Delvis said:
Probably the best thing about Vista in all honesty ;)

If you use a usb floppy, you 'might' have a problem with the O/S install not reading from certain floppy drives...If so, we have a little fix at work that I could throw along to you if the time comes.
Click to expand...



I was thinking something simillar.
If it can't read a stick over USB, how would it read a floppy, both are reported the same are they not? Just "usb disc drive".


You only need all this F6 malarkey if you're installing the OS itself on the RAID. If not, install as normal, then set the RAID up once up and running.
 
They are different, as I believe a USB floppy effectively sets up a transparent bridge or some such, whereas a USB stick is simply a mass storage device, hence in Windows it will always set a USB floppy as drive A: or B:. Or something like that. I can say for sure that for XP, USB floppy drives work and memory sticks don't.
 
Can't beat the old floppy drives! Until they invent something as solid and guarenteed to be able to be used at any level of o/s, I'm not ditching mine!
 
TBH, I keep an FDD on standby in a drawer, complete with data cable and molex-floppy adaptor pre-attached. If I ever need one, I just drop the case side off, plug it into the board and let it sit on it's side beside the HDD bays at the bottom of the case. Means you can use it for stupid OS's with no raid drivers, but still take the ugly brute out. Also saves on the 30second delay and accompanying "pukka pukka pukka" noise any time windows opens a file selector or file browser window (although if you have a floppy installed, you can kill it off in Bios and windows to avoid this (must do both, if you kill it in bios but not in win, it will hang the file-seclector until the detect floppy routine times out....if you disable in win but not BIOS, you may still get pukkapukkapukkaing.)

Never liked them much, and with the atrocious quality of current floppies, they are to be avoided if at all possible.
 
what sata controller is it?

raid slipstreamer takes care of most -not nvidia now :/

then use nlite to rebuild the disc
 
look on msfn forums in the nlite section, there's a mini guide saying how to do it with nlite (it's easy)
 
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