game_over Posted October 15, 2010 Share Posted October 15, 2010 What is BIOS? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
1510 Posted October 15, 2010 Share Posted October 15, 2010 Why not invest / spend a couple of bucks (10$) on a 3.5" cardreader. (Akasa or Skythe or OEM) I replaced all the floppy drives in the household for a akasa cardreaders. (you can even read simcards from your phone to quickly backup important phonenumbers) A 4GB CompactFlash card is very cheap. You can create a bootable image on them and or store the complete windows 7 / Vista installation and install the OS in mere minutes. I believe a pack of 10 new 3.5"diskettes cost more than a single 4GB CF-card... I wanted to replace my 3.5 floppy drive with a 3.5 floppy drive with memory card readers. Best of both worlds :) Something like this but cheaper: http://www.amazon.com/Floppy-USB2-0-Internal-Memory-Reader/dp/B001L1GKTM Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lazure Posted October 16, 2010 Share Posted October 16, 2010 Yea floppys are so yesterday but I do a lot of pro-bono work for non-profits and a lot of them still have them due to financial constraints. So I keep my 12 year old floopy drive to move updates and database fixes for them. It has worked fine since Win7 RC and a rebuild earlier this year. Suggestion if the drive is dead and you still need the best bet is a USB one, no install and you can use it on any machine plus they are cheap. Just what kinda data do you use floppies for? Even a decent sized word document nowadays wouldn't fit on those things. File sizes for just about any modern format are considerably large in this day and age. Even if you can fit your stuff on them, how do you find the massive amount of time it takes for floppies to transfer that small amount of data acceptable? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
1510 Posted October 16, 2010 Share Posted October 16, 2010 Even a decent sized word document nowadays wouldn't fit on those things. This is offtopic but I just made a 200 pages docx document full of Qs and it reaches 24KB Dont make up data on the spot because someone proves you wrong and you look like you have no idea what you are talking about. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Japlabot Posted October 16, 2010 Share Posted October 16, 2010 Do yourself a favour, if you really need a floppy drive for whatever reason, buy a USB Floppy Drive. They are more practical because once you have one, you will never need another floppy drive again (just plug it into whichever computer you want, as you need it). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ozgeek Posted October 16, 2010 Share Posted October 16, 2010 Ohhh the memories of using hundreds of those "easy-to-corrupt" disks just to hold a program or game. If one disk in the "pack" dies, then the rest is useless. lol. The days! I remember going to school one day with a disk of my assignments only to find the disk has corrupted. Got reprimarded for not doing my assignments when infact I did. Now I have 2 in my PC spare part box and none in my computer. Absolutely no use for them. I still have the thousand disks that would all total 1GB and I have 2,GB, 4GB and 8GB usb drive! But some people now use floppies as boot devices. Some computers need floppies to install device drivers like SATA, etc. Less of a worry nowadays. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lazure Posted October 16, 2010 Share Posted October 16, 2010 Ohhh the memories of using hundreds of those "easy-to-corrupt" disks just to hold a program or game. If one disk in the "pack" dies, then the rest is useless. lol. The days! I remember going to school one day with a disk of my assignments only to find the disk has corrupted. Got reprimarded for not doing my assignments when infact I did. Now I have 2 in my PC spare part box and none in my computer. Absolutely no use for them. I still have the thousand disks that would all total 1GB and I have 2,GB, 4GB and 8GB usb drive! But some people now use floppies as boot devices. Some computers need floppies to install device drivers like SATA, etc. Less of a worry nowadays. That was a terrible experience, lol. A game that's like 14mb uncompressed and installed, took like an hour to install from the half dozen floppies or so it came with. I did lose a game once to one floppy that goes bad, too! I remember having to use like 30 floppies to install Windows 95, since my CD-ROM at the time was broken and they weren't as cheap to get as they are now. The last time I relied on floppies, though, was in Windows 2000. It wouldn't boot the disc by itself for whatever reason, so I had to make 4 floppies using the utility on the CD so it would boot the installer. Once XP came around, and I had a machine that would actually boot an OS disc, no more floppies in my machines. There's just so many clear cut alternatives that are much faster and contain more than 1000x the space, and don't have nearly as much risk of corruption. This is why I am puzzled at why anyone still needs to use a floppy drive today. I guess though, you could get it working enough to grab data off old floppies, and migrate all that data to new media and be done with it. You can grab a 4GB cruzer from wal-mart for pretty cheap and it'd work in any machine with a usb port! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+devHead Subscriber² Posted October 16, 2010 Subscriber² Share Posted October 16, 2010 I enabled it from BIOS and I entered 3 or 4 disks and every time I get a message saying please enter a floppy disk and the LED is not glowing at all even when I enter a disk Perhaps the drive itself is dead. How old is it? I mean, if it's a floppy drive, it's gotta be kind of old, right? Like late 90s? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lazure Posted October 16, 2010 Share Posted October 16, 2010 If you were to put in an Ubuntu liveCD, think it would pick up a floppy drive if one was present? You could try that and see if you can't access it there in some way. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
helpifIcan Posted October 16, 2010 Share Posted October 16, 2010 Just what kinda data do you use floppies for? Even a decent sized word document nowadays wouldn't fit on those things. File sizes for just about any modern format are considerably large in this day and age. Even if you can fit your stuff on them, how do you find the massive amount of time it takes for floppies to transfer that small amount of data acceptable? Belive it or not their needs are so small I can actually fit their Access database on one floppy. If they had equipment that had usb I would use that instead. Iknow it's weird but I like helping those who help others. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr. Gibs Posted October 16, 2010 Share Posted October 16, 2010 Just what kinda data do you use floppies for? Even a decent sized word document nowadays wouldn't fit on those things. File sizes for just about any modern format are considerably large in this day and age. Even if you can fit your stuff on them, how do you find the massive amount of time it takes for floppies to transfer that small amount of data acceptable? What word documents do you have that take up 1.2mb =/ I have like 20page + engineering reports in .docx that don't even take up 200kb, let alone 1.2mb. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lazure Posted October 16, 2010 Share Posted October 16, 2010 Belive it or not their needs are so small I can actually fit their Access database on one floppy. If they had equipment that had usb I would use that instead. Iknow it's weird but I like helping those who help others. Their computers don't have USB ports? Holy crap, they're really using dirt old stuff. :o What OS are these things running exactly? I had USB ports when I had Windows 98. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fred Derf Veteran Posted October 16, 2010 Veteran Share Posted October 16, 2010 What word documents do you have that take up 1.2mb =/ I have like 20page + engineering reports in .docx that don't even take up 200kb, let alone 1.2mb. Embedded (copy/pasted) pictures will do it pretty fast. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lazure Posted October 16, 2010 Share Posted October 16, 2010 Embedded (copy/pasted) pictures will do it pretty fast. ^ what he said. I've done this before many a time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TEX4S Posted October 17, 2010 Share Posted October 17, 2010 When I hear about people who are still using relics like this - computer w/ no USB & floppy drives & using Access - it makes me want to kill them - consider it thinning the herd for the sake of the herd. Cant let that stuff procreate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The_Decryptor Veteran Posted October 17, 2010 Veteran Share Posted October 17, 2010 Regardless of the problem (It's probably a loose cable), I would definitely recommend a USB floppy drive. I've managed to get one and I don't use floppy disks any more (the only time I ever used it was when I was bored and created a RAID out of random USB devices) Embedded (copy/pasted) pictures will do it pretty fast. I've got a 9 page long assignment that's 3.5MB, just due to the pictures (which is 949KB in PDF format :laugh: ) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ozgeek Posted October 17, 2010 Share Posted October 17, 2010 For those still with floppy drives (and if it has an internet connection, even just dialup) it's best to just upload the files to a server and then go somewhere else like from office to home, and download it. This still stands today. Better than risks of losing sticks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fred Derf Veteran Posted October 17, 2010 Veteran Share Posted October 17, 2010 Regardless of the problem (It's probably a loose cable), I would definitely recommend a USB floppy drive. He apparently has a pre-USB computer. Although, I would note that you can get USB ports on a <$20 PCI card (unless he has a pre-PCI computer?). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The_Decryptor Veteran Posted October 17, 2010 Veteran Share Posted October 17, 2010 Man, I got an old USB1 PCI card for about $50 like 8 years ago. But wait, how would you runn Windows 7 64bit on a computer without USB? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ci7 Posted October 17, 2010 Share Posted October 17, 2010 But wait, how would you runn Windows 7 64bit on a computer without USB? errm!!! PS2 port ! oh wait! computer that old cant possibly run 64bit :s Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
helpifIcan Posted October 17, 2010 Share Posted October 17, 2010 Their computers don't have USB ports? Holy crap, they're really using dirt old stuff. :o What OS are these things running exactly? I had USB ports when I had Windows 98. WIN95 ouch I even had one running 3.1 windows util I found someone to donate new to them. What they had served their purpose, but I did get them out of the stone age. Amazing what some folks will settle for! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Southern Patriot Posted October 17, 2010 Share Posted October 17, 2010 Some people around here have serious reading comprehension problems. The OP isn't using a pre-USB machine, his clients are, which is why they are giving him documents on floppy disk. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The_Decryptor Veteran Posted October 17, 2010 Veteran Share Posted October 17, 2010 That doesn't explain why the OP couldn't use an USB floppy drive then. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glen Posted October 17, 2010 Share Posted October 17, 2010 I'd like to ask a few of questions of the OP to help determine the ultimate cause of the failure. When you upgraded, did you go from Vista 32bit to Win7 64bit? Did you use the upgrade option, or was it a clean install type of upgrade? When was the last time you used the floppy successfully in Vista? As someone else had asked, is there an "unknown device" in your device manager list? Also, in the event that you cannot get this fixed, I'd like to recommend possibly using a cloud storage service such as Office Live or Google Docs. These types of services allow you to collaborate with people at different locations and have some really nice features. If sensitive PII (personally identifiable information) is present in the documents, they can be zipped with an encryption key before being stored on the cloud service to ensure that only those authorized will see the data contained within. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
soldier1st Posted October 18, 2010 Share Posted October 18, 2010 why do you want to use an ancient device the floppy drive in Windows 7? isin't it time for you to move away from the floppy on to newer and better alternatives. the floppy drive had it's use years ago, it is time to no longer support it(i officialy no longer support it but unnoficialy i support everything meaning as needed but no more) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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