When is the last time you used a FLOPPY disk?
 

And I mean the 3½ inch, not the 5¼! Also, I should say, by "use" I do not mean: to level out uneven table legs, etc.

i looked some pics i found on an old one last year?

my new computer doesn't have an A drive.

Yeah, please vote.

I used one today, right now, to pre-load RAID drivers during an XP install. This still only can be done with floppy, apparently.

Well, we used a 5.25 in the last year as well. With an old original IBM PC.

I would like to note that in my family (both parents in the computer tech industry) we never referred to the 3-1/2" disks as floppy disks. Because the 5-1/4" were actually floppy, you see, while the smaller ones did not flop, they were stiff. We called them "crunchy" disks to differentiate.


Yes, seriously.

I just tried out my new old USB 3.5" floppy drive on my Dell at work today. No disk, but it worked.

RAID drivers.

FreeDOS image for Intel Cards
 

That's what I did last week...built another Ultimate Boot CD with the Intel flash update utility for their NIC cards so we can reboot the servers over the IP KVM and enable advanced networking features on them.

I have a USB floppy drive in my lap top bag ,
and I Keep a spare A drive in my truck ,
some time I have to reload Old programs and some of the existing A drives go SQUISH when you put a floppy in them

Hey, it's FOUR and a half inches! and it isn't always floppy!


Oh, wait, disk. Sorry.


I have some at home, still have a machine to read them, don't think I've used one since ... 2005.


: blinks :


WTF did he just say?

My home PC went tits up a few months ago. The BOOT.INI file got corrupted and I had to recreate it so I needed to use the restore disk. Well, it didn't work, but I had created a bootable 3 1/2 and installed certain boot files (using attrib -r).

Anyway, I got it booted and got enough of the BOOT.INI file repaired to where it would recognize the partition and boot up. Then I used the Restore CD and repaired it all.

Sure beats the hell out of buying a new PC or paying out the ass to have it done. I know I make it sound like it took me just a wee-wittle-bit-O-time. The reality of it is that it took me about two weeks to figure it all out and another week to load everything back up (I do keep backups of important stuff like my wife's music, my wife's photos, my wifes document files, etc...).

:lol2:

I have a whole box of them that I have to move to a more modern format.

Anybody got a portable 3.5 drive I can borrow?

Was cleaning my room the other day and found these. :p Took a picture before trashing them.

But they'd go for a fortune on Craig's List. :haha:

I think the last time I used a floppy disc (3 1/2) was about four or five years ago. It had some drivers on it and I * was reinstalling XP. My current computer, which I've had for about 3 years, doesn't have a floppy drive.

*I wasn't really reinstalling. J was reinstalling for me and I was fannying about with old discs to see what was on them.

I still have some of those too!

Kind of like an old woman who hasn't had anything in her slot for a long time, either.

I think within the last year. I also have a USB external floppy disk drive. I still have a lot of old files on disk that I haven't used in ages. I'm thinking of transferring and burning to a CD or DVD and getting rid of them.

My shredder will shred CD's and DVD's, but obviously not 3 1/2 floppies. But pull out the metal shield and snip the film with a scissors, and they are secure against any low level identity thief.

Pile 'em in the street, douse 'em with diesel fuel, torch 'em, while dancing around naked, except body paint/feathers. If anyone objects, babble about freedom of religion, the Constitution, and Sarah Palin. :corn:

Zip disks count as floppies? I'm pretty sure I was still using those at my job 10 years ago.

I have old portfolio work stashed on 3.5" disks and a zip disk or two...why I keep them, I do not know. I can't look at the stuff on them, and wouldn't want to either!

At my tech school, I was in one of the last classes to compile programs using punch cards. At my first job one of my jobs was to change over a department that was processing rejected punch cards by hand to a using a report.

I am, however, too young to have used paper tape, which was like large ticker tape.

I don't remember if I ever used an 8" floppy disk.

Not only do I still code in COBOL, I am the same age as COBOL!

Another floppy day. Pre-loading RAID drivers, making ASR discs.

I'll have to use one on Saturday to update the BIOS on one of my PC.

In fact, that is the last thing I use them for.

Why are 8" floppy disks not part of the discussion? My first floppy disks were 8". Anybody use paper tape?

OMG, tw has an 8 inch floppy.

Hard now. Floppy later. Technology marched on.

5 years ago or so. I have a bunch of poetry on one or two. They just sit there gathering dust too.

LOL- I voted without reading the first post. I voted thinking a floppy was the old big ones as well... not the ones that didn't "flop." Mine should prob be within the last five years I would guess. We used to use them a lot in school before they installed (LOL) Zip drives. Then everything switched over to zips. Stupid.

Hey NOW !!!

Zip drives were awesome! For about a year there.

Hard drives were supposed to be obsoleted by optical drives some years ago. We were supposed to go from hard drives, to floppy drives, to voyeur drives. About the same time, moralists took over the government. Innovation stifled.

2002/3 for me. In my Visual Basic programming class in high school, the Zip drives were always broken so we resorted to floppies since USB flash drives weren't as cheap or common back then.

Hahahaha. I still love you, zip. No optical drive can tear me from you.

LOL Zippy, no insult intended :P

In my area, they still use floppies.........
http://cache.wists.com/thumbnails/7/...d11a16ce9-orig

I have a box of 5 1/4" floppies and a ribbon for an Epson 9-pin dot-matrix printer in my office, both sealed. One day I'm going to put on an exhibit of obsolete computer stuff.

Not only do I have a bunch of lightly used 3.25 inchers, I have empty disk storage boxes that lock. I can't even find a picture of them on line.

Like this? Or, the clear ones that could hold around 50?

I have one of those, somewhere. (The larger ones.) I forget where I picked it up.

Floppy Disks (3.5" variety) are awesome. They'll never be out-dated, never be obsolete!

I'm about to try using nLite 1.4.9.1 to build an XP disc slipstreamed with Intel Matrix Storage Manager.

If this goes reasonably smoothly, I sadly will have less reason to visit my friend, the USB floppy drive.

Well the bootable image I built with nLite has successfully loaded iastor without prompting and is now formatting the drive.

I am also trying the the "Unattended" feature which let me preload prompts (like the key, the language/timezone) that usually require you to hover over an install...as well as preload user, domain, network info, etc. ...waiting to see how that part goes...

I popped the CD in and the entire install ran without intervention. The first thing I've had to click is "to inprove the appearance of visual elements" (although I believe I could have specified the resolution etc. as well). Hmmm...the auto updates setting didn't stick (it is asking me how I want it set). I'm having to enter a "temp" username...even though now I see that the user I built is in place.

Maybe these wouldn't happen if I ran at full auto, but also it would error out and not tell me in this case, if I didn't specify a field properly that was needed.

Well, the actual problem of not having a USB Floppy at home with me was solved by building a slipstreamed CD with this utility, so in that regard "mission accomplished."