Question about external 3.5" floppy drives

Howard_Stern

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Aug 15, 2006
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I'm building my new computer in which I plan to use a RAID 0 array. As you know using a RAID O on some motherboards require you to load RAID drivers via a floppy.

I don't want to have a floppy drive in my case I use once during the build.

The question is, can I plug in an external floppy drive and load my drivers (of course before the OS is loaded since this is a build)? Will it still read as A: ?

Thanks Gents and Ladies. :)
Howard
 

burn-e86

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a floppy drive only costs like $5. but apart from that i think that an external one will work, though you may have to change some settings in the BIOS to get it to work prior to system startup. I'm pretty sure that nowadays you can actually burn the drivers onto a disk and use your CD drive instead.
If i remember you burn a disk with the drivers that you would have had on the floppy, then when installing press F6 as you normally would, it wil search for the drivers when it cant find any it will ask you for them, swap out your WinXP disk with the driver disk and input the correct drive path. then when its installed just reinsert your WinXP disk. or use 2 drives. though i cant acually remember if it works. also i've heard that you can do it using a flash drive though i cant remember how you would come about to do it.
 

MisfitSELF

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Quick answer: YES; depending on your motherboard it should even be bootable.

I bought one (external USB 3.5" floppy) to go with a laptop a few years ago and ended up using it for a similar purpose as you propose. I later built a desktop machine with a goal of installing no floppy drive. Unfortunately, there are still some tasks the are best suited to having a floppy drive: like flashing bios or loading RAID drivers. I plugged my USB floppy in and it worked just fine.
 

zenmaster

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Never seen any limitations with USB Floppies on any system for quite a while.

If you were working on a system when USB first came out, then maybe.

If you were using any system built new within the last couple years there is no limit. It looks/acts just like an internal one.
 

rantsky

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Well I don't know the entire story here, so I'll just guess... Why not get an internal 1.44 and just have it connected while you install Windows? You don't even have to plug it into the case, just connect it to the board and have it sit on your desk until Windows is installed. Then you can disconnect it and shove it in the closet when you're done... No need for special MB support, and it's probably cheaper.