Install Drivers without a floppy drive. Win 7 - Win XP Dual Boot

[BMorgan53]

I am building my own computer and I want to run both Win XP Pro SP3 and Windows 7 64 bit. The only reason I'm wanting to keep XP is that several of my old programs, that I still use, are not compatable with Windows 7. I know XP is sometimes "fussy" about installing on SATA drives and requires the F6 to install the drivers. The mother board I'm using does not support floppy drives.

Motherboard. ASUS P8Z68-V LX
Processor: INTEL: i5-2500K
Hardrive: Western Digital - Caviar Black WD7502AAEX 750 GB

I've seen a couple of internal and external USB floppy drives, but I'm not sure that they'll work on first boot during the installation.

Any suggestion?

Thanks ahead,

Added 01/10/2012 Thanks for the info, the one key piece I left out is that the HD is in AHCI not RAID.

- Also would installing a floppy drive and attaching it to a PCI IDE Controller Card work?

- Can you run XP virtual machine in 32 bit on a 64 bit Windows 7 platform.

Thanks ahead again.

 

[das_stig]

External USB FDD works ok, use it on my server, along with an external USB DVD-RW.

If the old XP apps are not CPU or GPU intensive, why not run them in a virtual box with an XP install.

Then just create a share between W7 and XP virtual machine.

 

[ram1009]

I gave up trying to set up a RAID in a similar situation. Even though my USB floppy was detected by the BIOS it would never load the driver properly. I also tried integrating the RAID driver into the XP install disk using a free program called "nlite". The driver integration seemed to go well but I was never able to get the RAID running. EDIT: BTW, my experience was with an ASUS MB also.

 

[jitpublisher]

Have a read, very handy and simply works.
http://lifehacker.com/386526/slipstream-service-pack-3-into-your-windows-xp-installation-cd

 

[ram1009]

Have a read, very handy and simply works.
http://lifehacker.com/386526/slipstream-service-pack-3-into-your-windows-xp-installation-cd

I did all of this and it "simply didn't work".

 

[jitpublisher]

I did all of this and it "simply didn't work".

Well, I dunno, worked for me for a long time.

 

[Traildriver]

I am running a dual boot Win 7 64 bit / XP unit. I had to scrounge an old floppy drive from one of my other units and temporarily use that. Never could get the USB method to work. And I do not run in RAID either which avoided that issue. They are separate partitions on the same HDD. Win 7 was installed first by NCIX. I installed XP (yes it was a new unused package I had purchased some time ago just for this purpose) after modifying the partitions.

Of course I was lucky, my MB had a legacy floppy port.

 

[ram1009]

Well, I dunno, worked for me for a long time.

I'm sure it did. My point is that it doesn't work for evry situation.