Tasks requiring FDD... ?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Martin D. Pay
  • Start date Start date
M

Martin D. Pay

Gentles...

If you have a system with a decidedly dodgy FDD (or indeed a
system with no FDD at all) is there any way of carrying out
certain tasks that traditionally have always needed doing from
FDD?

I'm thinking specifically here of:-

a) flashing the motherboard BIOS

b) loading RAID drivers on a new build system


I'm shortly to start building a new system (something I haven't
done for a few years now) and I know the only FDD I have (I mean,
who uses floppies these days?) is flaky. This is not an ideal
thing when flashing a BIOS!

The RAID question isn't quite so important as I won't be going
over to a RAID configuration just yet (I need to buy a pair of
matching SATA II HDDs first) but I would be interested in any
answers to the question nonetheless!

Thanks in advance to those folks out there who know more about
this stuff than I do!

Martin D. Pay
Looking forward to replacing his 4 year old system with something
that can play the new Doom!
 
Okay, unless you are going to boot off of a IDE Drive.. you need the
SATA drivers on a floppy drive in order to install WINDOWS XP
regardless if you raid it or not.

Flashing motherboard / videocard Bios - you can do some of it in
windows. but if you screw up, then you need a floppy drive and blindly
press buttons (Pray).
Or get a motherboard with two BIOS chips.. Gigabyte.

[Thundersha 278850]

Games that I like to play
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Games</a><br><a href=http://gc.gamestotal.com/>Galactic Conquest</a> -
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Okay, unless you are going to boot off of a IDE Drive..
you need the SATA drivers on a floppy drive in order
to install WINDOWS XP regardless if you raid it or not.
Click to expand...

Nope, not with SP2 and most of the more recent motherboards.
Flashing motherboard / videocard Bios - you can do
some of it in windows. but if you screw up, then you
need a floppy drive and blindly press buttons (Pray).
Or get a motherboard with two BIOS chips.. Gigabyte.
Click to expand...

Or get real radical and decide that a new floppy
drive adds peanuts to the cost of the new system.

Martin D. Pay wrote:
Click to expand...

Wot abart us Unspeakables ?
 
Martin said:
Gentles...

If you have a system with a decidedly dodgy FDD (or indeed a
system with no FDD at all) is there any way of carrying out
certain tasks that traditionally have always needed doing from
FDD?

I'm thinking specifically here of:-

a) flashing the motherboard BIOS
Click to expand...

Yes, you can create a bootable CD, it's more work, but it can be done.

b) loading RAID drivers on a new build system
Click to expand...

Also can be done by slipstreaming the drivers into your install CD.
More work.....
I'm shortly to start building a new system (something I haven't
done for a few years now) and I know the only FDD I have (I mean,
who uses floppies these days?) is flaky. This is not an ideal
thing when flashing a BIOS!
Click to expand...

The NEW systems have mostly gone over to windows flash stuff.
 
Flashing motherboard / videocard Bios - you can do some of it in
windows. but if you screw up, then you need a floppy drive and blindly
press buttons (Pray).
Or get a motherboard with two BIOS chips.. Gigabyte.
Click to expand...


It is a bad idea to flash the bios in windows. The odds of
a problem go up drastically. While it is now better than it
used to be, it's still an additional and needless risk over
doing it the old fashioned way.

However, "old fashioned way" doesn't have to mean using a
floppy. Alternate methods of flashing a bios include any
device the motherboard can boot (to DOS) from. These
include but are not limited to:

- Zip drive

- Hard drive (FAT16 or 32 of course, not NTFS)

- CDROM

- External version of the above or other drives

- USB Thumbdrive

- USB Card reader with SD, CF, whatever... though some bios
and card reader combinations work and others dont. For
example, one board (PCChips M789CG but same applies to
others) will boot a SD flash card from a generic "i-rocks"
multicard reader, but not from a somewhat similar unlabeled
"8-in-1" card reader. Most often the best odds of success
IF the board really properly supports booting from flash
cards, is to use a single slot card reader that only
supports one card type. Even then it's not guaranteed I
suppose, but it's always worked for me if the board would
boot anything (meaning any USB removable floppy emulated
device).

Come to think of it, on almost all systems here I have
floppy drives in them but I always use one of the above
alternate methods instead as floppies and drives are so
unreliable. HOWEVER, there is still a very important
related need for a floppy drive, that if/when a bios flash
goes wrong, often the bios boot block is still intact and
the system could boot from a floppy IF you had one,
configured correctly, to emergency flash a known good bios
even if the system has no video display.

Beware of depending on Gigabyte's dual bios, as some have
had problems where some glitch prevented it from using the
good bios so the board was still dead, and with both bios
chips soldered on it was worse than having a board with
single EEPROM instead that was socketed so it could be
swapped out for an EEPROM with a viable bios on it (whether
different EPROM or same one reflashed elsewhere).
 
You can streamline the SATA drivers during a clean window XP install?
0.o

[Thundersha 278850]

Games that I like to play
<a href=http://www.gamestotal.com/>Multiplayer Online Games</a> <a
href=http://www.gamestotal.com/>Strategy Games</a><br><a
href=http://uc.gamestotal.com/>Unification Wars</a> - <a
href=http://uc.gamestotal.com/>Massive Multiplayer Online
Games</a><br><a href=http://gc.gamestotal.com/>Galactic Conquest</a> -
<a href=http://gc.gamestotal.com/>Strategy Games</a><br><a
href=http://www.stephenyong.com/runescape.htm>Runescape</a><br><a
href=http://www.stephenyong.com/kingsofchaos.htm>Kings of chaos</a><br>
 
You can streamline the SATA drivers during a clean window XP install?
Click to expand...

Yes you can, but you dont need to do that with
SP2 on the CD and most recent motherboards.
 
I know how to streamline SATA drivers..
I am talking about when you boot from the WINDOW XP CD to install...
and the window installation process loads drivers.. you have to press
F6 to load motherboard SATA drivers for the windows installation
process to read the SATA drive?

[Thundersha 278850]
Games that I like to play (or another tagline)

<a href=http://www.gamestotal.com/>Multiplayer Online Games</a> <a
href=http://www.gamestotal.com/>Strategy Games</a><br><a
href=http://uc.gamestotal.com/>Unification Wars</a> - <a
href=http://uc.gamestotal.com/>Massive Multiplayer Online
Games</a><br><a href=http://gc.gamestotal.com/>Galactic Conquest</a> -
<a href=http://gc.gamestotal.com/>Strategy Games</a><br><a
href=http://www.stephenyong.com/runescape.htm>Runescape</a><br><a
href=http://www.stephenyong.com/kingsofchaos.htm>Kings of chaos</a><br>
 
I know how to streamline SATA drivers..
I am talking about when you boot from the WINDOW XP CD to install...
and the window installation process loads drivers.. you have to press
F6 to load motherboard SATA drivers for the windows installation
process to read the SATA drive?
Click to expand...

And I am saying that you dont need to do that last stuff
when the CD has SP2 with most of the latest motherboards.
 
And I am saying that you dont need to do that last stuff
when the CD has SP2 with most of the latest motherboards.
Click to expand...


and he's saying what about the remaining boards besides the
"most of the latest"?

The answer was already given, you can slipstream, or have
the floppy, or if the board's bios enumerates a USB device
as an emulated floppy, "maybe" that way, I don't recall.
 
and he's saying what about the remaining
boards besides the "most of the latest"?
Click to expand...

No he isnt.
The answer was already given, you can slipstream, or have
the floppy, or if the board's bios enumerates a USB device
as an emulated floppy, "maybe" that way, I don't recall.
Click to expand...

No news to me, boy.
 
Okay, unless you are going to boot off of a IDE Drive.. you need the
SATA drivers on a floppy drive in order to install WINDOWS XP
regardless if you raid it or not.
Click to expand...

Interesting...since I've had no problems installing Windows XP on
several systems that have only SATA hard disks, no FDD, and no need
for extra drivers to be loaded during the character-mode startup when
booting from the MS distribution CD.

One qualifier: I'm working from a Windows XP distribution that includes
Service Pack 2. It's possible that the SATA drivers were added by one
of the service packs.

Also...even with SP2 you can run into problems if you have a computer
whose SATA controller offers an "enhanced" SATA interface. (An
example of this is the Thinkpad X60, but I don't have one handy
right now to get the actual name of the mode used in the BIOS setup
screens.) Setting the BIOS option to use {compatible, legacy, ?} mode
allows the setup to continue; you can switch the mode later once
you've built the system.

Joe Morris
 
The board will be the MSI K8N SLi-Fi.
It is a bad idea to flash the bios in windows. The odds of
a problem go up drastically. While it is now better than it
used to be, it's still an additional and needless risk over
doing it the old fashioned way.
Click to expand...

I had a feeling that was the case. ISTR reading many stories
about MSI's own 'Live Update' tool causing problems... :(
However, "old fashioned way" doesn't have to mean using a
floppy. Alternate methods of flashing a bios include any
device the motherboard can boot (to DOS) from. These
include but are not limited to:

- Zip drive
Click to expand...

None of those here...
- Hard drive (FAT16 or 32 of course, not NTFS)
Click to expand...

Ah! I have 2 HDDs in my system - the C drive is NTFS (Win XP, SP1
and SP2, the latter off a Microsoft CD) but the D drive is
FAT32... All I need to be able to do, then, is boot a Win XP
system to DOS... ^_-
- CDROM
Click to expand...

Bootable CD? Maybe I'll have to read up on how to make one of
those with the BIOS flash utilities on...

<snip remaining comments>

Thanks for the info, folks. The easiest method may be to use the
FAT32 HDD...

Martin D. Pay
Awaiting the courier with the components... ^_^
 
Thanks for the info, folks. The easiest method may be to use the
FAT32 HDD...
Click to expand...


One thing I failed to mention previously was that it is
highly preferrible to either boot to or have available,
accessible from DOS flashing environment, a writable media.

That way, when given the option to back up the original bios
it can be done, while booting to a CDR for example you can
only flash the new bios. Admittedly I've often skipped
saving the old bios but when the opportunity is present it
is a good idea.
 
Okay, unless you are going to boot off of a IDE Drive.. you need the
SATA drivers on a floppy drive in order to install WINDOWS XP
regardless if you raid it or not.
Click to expand...

Okay that's just wrong. The system I built in April has a fresh SATA
hard drive as it's boot disk, no RAID and I installed Win XP from a CD
with no floppy disk installed in the system.

--
I used to have abs. Now, I've just got ab.
One big ol' Ab. - BigSkiff www.titanspot.com

Pyongyang sounds more like the sound effect an ACME catapult makes
as it goes off at precisely the wrong moment for Wile E. Coyote. -
Cadbury Moose
 
I know how to streamline SATA drivers..
I am talking about when you boot from the WINDOW XP CD to install...
and the window installation process loads drivers.. you have to press
F6 to load motherboard SATA drivers for the windows installation
process to read the SATA drive?
Click to expand...

I didn't.

--
I used to have abs. Now, I've just got ab.
One big ol' Ab. - BigSkiff www.titanspot.com

Pyongyang sounds more like the sound effect an ACME catapult makes
as it goes off at precisely the wrong moment for Wile E. Coyote. -
Cadbury Moose
 
Okay that's just wrong. The system I built in April has a fresh SATA
hard drive as it's boot disk, no RAID and I installed Win XP from a CD
with no floppy disk installed in the system.
Click to expand...


It depends on the controller, some will need it and others
won't, but if we had to lean one way or the other it is
better to be prepared and not need it, than to not be
prepared and need it.
 
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