
	Where results make sense

Topic: Floppies

In the News (Sat 22 Nov 08)

Lee Scott

Annika Sorenstam

Norm Coleman

Benji Madden

Freddie Mac

Puerto Rico

Vladimir Putin

Treasury Department

Mitt Romney

Giovanni Trapattoni

	Floppy Disk Drive Primer
		Floppy disk drives were originally introduced commercially as a read-only device to hold microcode and diagnostics for large IBM mainframe computer systems in the early 1970s.
		Since common floppy drives don't have a sophisticated servo system, they must be carefully aligned in order to ensure the very important ability of reliably exchanging data diskettes with other drives.
		If you need to service a floppy drive from a system other than a PC or Mac, this requires a little more work because generally you will find that system level floppy diagnostics which include testing for the drive's alignment parameters are not available.
	www.accurite.com /FloppyPrimer.html (3613 words)

	Floppies
		A floppy corresponds to one platter in a hard disk, but is removable and one drive can be used to access different floppies, and the same floppy can be read by many drives, whereas the hard disk is one indivisible unit.
		Like a hard disk, a floppy is divided into tracks and sectors (and the two corresponding tracks on either side of a floppy form a cylinder), but there are many fewer of them than on a hard disk.
		The names for floppy drives are complex, however, and Linux therefore has a special floppy device type that automatically detects the type of the disk in the drive.
	jamesthornton.com /linux/sag/x1042.html (449 words)

	What is floppy disk? - A Word Definition From the Webopedia Computer Dictionary
		Unlike most hard disks, floppy disks (often called floppies or diskettes) are portable, because you can remove them from a disk drive.
		Floppy disks are slower to access than hard disks and have less storage capacity, but they are much less expensive.
		This type of floppy is generally capable of storing between 100K and 1.2MB (megabytes) of data.
	www.webopedia.com /TERM/f/floppy_disk.html (474 words)

	Floppies hard-up for work - PCStats.com
		At the core of the floppy disk is something called the media, which consists of a plastic disk coated in a chemical compound that is sensitive to magnetic impulses - basically, rust.
		One of the reasons floppies are not the most reliable means of storing information is that the read-write heads must come into physical contact with the media, which causes wear and tear.
		Another reason floppies are unstable is the mechanism that drives the read-write heads across their surface.
	www.pcstats.com /articleview.cfm?articleID=382 (660 words)

	Floppies: Technology of the past?
		Compressing and trying to squeeze them on floppies was like trying to pack for a week-long vacation using a couple of those little clutch purses women take to the opera.
		While the drives are about the same price as a floppy drive (about $100 for an internal unit), the disks retail for about $15 each (less if you buy in bulk).
		Floppies are so common that most homes and offices have a box of old floppies to be used like scrap paper.
	www.enquirer.com /columns/brewer/1998/08/082398cb.html (722 words)

	Dell foments floppy's fall \| Tech News on ZDNet (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		Although the floppy may no longer be a technological necessity, Dell executives concede that it may still be important to some customers to have one--a security blanket for their PC.
		Floppies were thought to be threatened by the NetPC and legacy-free PC movements spawned by Compaq Computer's original iPaq desktop PC.
		Ultimately, "we think the usage (of floppies) will decline to such a level that an external floppy with a USB interface—that can be used for several PCs—will be acceptable," Schwarzbach said.
	zdnet.com.com /2100-1103-983596.html (1183 words)

	Annoyances.org - Win98 can't read Win95 floppies (Windows 98 Discussion Forum)
		These are new floppies formatted in Windows 95 on a Toshiba laptop.
		I do not believe the floppies are bad, and I have had trouble in the past going from one computer to another with a floppy disk.
		Because you have troubles with Windows formatted floppies doesn't mean you've proved that any systems are exclusive to each others floppies.
	www.annoyances.org /exec/forum/win98/t1065757522 (745 words)

	Windows 98: can I install windows 98 from floppies?
		I tried installing a W95 version from floppies, but it turned out to be an upgrade version to 3.11, so it was of no use to me at all.
		PS: Windows 95 did come in floppy or CD, but unless I can't remember correctly, Windows 98 and higher are not available on Floppy, just CD, or an OEM image on new machines.
		To recap, my suggestion is to remove the laptop hard drive, use an adapter to slave it in a desktop PC and copy your Windows 98 setup files to the laptop drive, return it to the laptop and run the setup file.
	www.experts-exchange.com /Operating_Systems/Win98/Q_20586920.html (1775 words)

	wild, uncertain 2K floppies - Cyber Tech Help Support Forums
		The floppies functioned fine when they were XP machines.
		What is going on might be that the motherboard is not compatable with the floppy controller in 2K (since both computers are the same brand it's suspicious).
		My First thought was the floppy controller is having an IRQ conflict, althought that seems almost too simple.
	www.cybertechhelp.com /forums/showthread.php?t=29732 (225 words)

	HFI5 (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		The number 1 cause for the floppy light staying lit continuously is a reversed cable at either the motherboard or drive end.
		NEVER stick a floppy disk into a drive if the floppy light is continuously lit because it will render the floppy unreadable.
		In addition, 90% of the floppy drives on the market today require the red stripe on the cable to face the power connector on the drive.
	www.tyan.com /support/html/hfi5.html (190 words)

	Wired News: News Flash: Floppies Are Not Dead
		Just when you thought it was finally safe to throw out all the floppy disks littering your desk and drawers, Panasonic has announced that there may still be life left in those little squares of plastic.
		Some wonder whether these reformed floppies will be as resilient as the old ones.
		But even floppy fan Turner was worried about the impact of FD32MB, which increases the amount of tracks by making the floppy disk's tracks smaller.
	www.wired.com /news/technology/0,1282,41716,00.html (737 words)

	Floppies? \| Musings
		But computer users have a strong connection to the floppy disk, a 3.5-inch square sandwich of plastic, aluminum and magnetic tape that hit the market in 1984, long before widespread adoption of the personal computer.
		The floppy dates back to the early 1970s when it was 8 inches wide and housed in a flimsy plastic shield, which produced the name floppy.
		The floppy was developed when computer data and memory were measured in bytes, not gigabytes, and when using a computer required rudimentary programming skills.
	golem.ph.utexas.edu /~distler/blog/archives/000097.html (988 words)

	Unix/Linux Basics
		A floppy filesystem does allow you to transfer files from one place to another by way of a shirt pocket.
		I'm going to assume that your floppy is a 3.5 inch 1.44 MB and that it is unit 0.
		Such a file is often a floppy image: that is, it is the bytes that tar or cpio would write directly to the floppy.
	aplawrence.com /Basics/floppy.html (1212 words)

	Boot Floppies
		This is a boot floppy that will allow you to access most CD ROM's.
		If you can't boot to NT for a variety of reasons, it might be a good idea to have made up a boot floppy before the problem arises.
		You can use this floppy to boot if you were getting errors like NTLDR not found.
	www.onecomputerguy.com /install/floppies.htm (497 words)

	Virtual Dr Forums-Computer Tech Support - copying floppies from Win 95 to XP
		Unlike hard disk drives, which are sealed and have their read/write heads in a controlled environment, floppy disk drives are exposed to the outside air, and all the contaminants that go with it.
		One maintenance activity that used to be part of the routine for floppy disks was to check and adjust their alignment.
		Now, a new floppy drive costs less than an hour of labor--often much less--so if a drive seems to be out of alignment, it is almost always better simply to replace it.
	discussions.virtualdr.com /showthread.php?threadid=191758 (970 words)

	Windows 95: Can you make a floppies from a Win 95 CD for reinstallation.
		Besides creating a huge zip file on a ton of 1.44 floppies and risking corruption, is there a way to create a complete set of floppies for a Windows 95 installation.
		This information is from a regular Floppy disk set from Microsoft, I have never actually made a set from a CD, but I have heard this can be done, as long as you know what files to include and you have the CD-Rom.
		The original Win95 floppy set was 13 disks, but I checked my CD of Win95OSR2 and there was 28 cab files, I know the floppy set does not include everything that the CD did and I am not sure how many Cab files were on the Win95a CD, I was just wondering for future references.
	www.experts-exchange.com /Operating_Systems/Win95_3x/Win95/Q_10341411.html (874 words)

	Floppies for the New Millennium \| Linux Journal (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		Floppies themselves are obsolete on account of low capacity, speed and reliability, but the need exists more than ever for impromptu file transport between machines, especially for those of us who travel about with laptops.
		Floppies are, by modern standards, too slow, too fallible and too tiny.
		Some other USB flash drives reportedly do mount precisely in that way, whereas I found out that the Easy Disk mounts as /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1 or any other partition number-that is, it treats the drive as a device lacking the ability to house a partition table.
	www.linuxjournal.com /article.php?sid%3D6867 (2264 words)

	Floppies, Zips, CDs and Whatever Comes Next
		Floppies of course continued to be supported in desktop Mac models until the introduction of the Blue & White G3 Towers in January, 1999, and a floppy drive was also available as an optional expansion bay device in the WallStreet PowerBook until the release of the Lombard G3 a year after the iMac’s debut.
		I still have maybe 100 or 150 floppies full of data, some of it written a decade ago, and I have a had any of this archived stuff go bad yet, although anything really important is backed up to other, more stable archive media.
		The Zip 100 MB and 250 MB disks were fairly logical successors to the old 1.4 MB floppy, but it’s still impossible to beat the economy and convenience of the floppy disk for quick transfers of small files, especially if they need to be sent away.
	www.applelinks.com /mooresviews/mediaobs.shtml (1526 words)

	ATPM 4.09 - Paradigm: Disk Copy—Not Just For Floppies
		From the beginning, the Mac could identify which floppy was which, then ask you to insert the proper one by name.
		If a floppy disk is ejected, its contents are grayed out; trying to open one of its files then asks you to insert the floppy (rather than summoning a cryptic error message)—all part of the Mac’s polish.
		The lack of a floppy drive is the iMac’s single boldest “feature.” (Hey, it is documented.) Soon, the few pieces of Mac software that still ship on floppies will switch over to CD-ROMs.
	www.atpm.com /4.09/page8.shtml (1865 words)

	SuSE Linux Portal
		If a ZIP floppy should be used with a MS-DOS file system, it should be contained on the 4th primary partition.
		If a ZIP floppy should be used with the ext2 file system, it should be on the first primary partition.
		If a floppy is prepared according to the rules given above, using mount reveals whether it is an MS-DOS or a Linux floppy: If an error occurs, it is the wrong file system.
	sdb.suse.de /en/sdb/html/maddin_zip.html (280 words)

	Files, Floppies and Flash! - Connections 2002 August Issue (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		Small "Floppy Disk" technology is now 20+ years old and, although it has been imitated by other bigger or better magnetic and optical removable storage devices such as Zip and SyQuest, it refuses to die.
		In our current NIEHS network environment I see some floppy holdouts peddling their file from computer to computer without knowing that the file can be easily transferred from any computer to another with a few clicks.
		So look for Floppies to be used less and less until they become as extinct as the old "Real Floppy" 5.25" disks and look for newer, bigger and faster technology like Fiber Optic, USB, DVD and Apple's FireWire to take over file storage and transfers is this ever changing world of High Tech.
	www.niehs.nih.gov /connections/2002/aug/floppy.htm (867 words)

	Dave Burke's Blog : From a thousand floppies to seven
		The client I was working for at that time made me copies (they always locked the original disks in a safe) and asked me to check it out and let him know what I thought.
		I'm pretty sure the two 5 1/4" floppies are in the treasures box, alas not originals though.
		Truthfully, it wasn't until DAO came out with VB 3.0 that I figured it was a viable development tool because then it could support databases and be used for real business application programming, not just games and cute graphics routines.
	dbvt.com /blog/archive/2005/07/13/2769.aspx (677 words)

	HOWTO: Creating SADR Floppies on a Non-Target Computer (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		When a disaster has occurred and the boot floppies have not been created prior to the disaster, then boot floppies need to be created on a different computer.
		They won't be started, and the utility won't automatically select them for creating the boot floppies, but they'll be available, and you can still select them for installing on the boot disks.
		With the .sy_ file from an original floppy* or CD, you can expand the files manually, and then when you run the boot floppy utility you can select those drivers even though they aren't installed into that operating system.
	www.ultrabac.com /kb6/htm/UBQ000157.htm (909 words)

	The FreeBSD Diary -- Creating boot floppies for FreeBSD
		Note that the files you are copying are not DOS files so you can not use regular copy procedures to put them on the floppy.
		However, you can create a single floppy if you use one of those high capacity floppies.
		If you are creating floppies from DOS, and you get told a file is too big, you probably downloaded the file in ASCII mode, not binary mode.
	www.freebsddiary.org /bootfloppies.php (440 words)

	Gentoo Forums :: View topic - Installing Gentoo With Slackware Floppies
		the problem with the toms boot floppy is that the kernel is too old.
		So you can boot using this floppy and you'll be able to tell it to boot the Gentoo CD on older computer with a BIOS that won't let you boot from the CD-Rom.
		Anyway, thanks for the little piece on installing from floppy, as my cd-drive doesn't work when support for its chipset is enabled, thus I can't install from any cd which I boot with a kernel with support for it...
	forums.gentoo.org /viewtopic.php?t=33121&highlight=installing+floppy (1375 words)

	Accessing CD's and Floppies from Linux
		The only other file systems you might run into are "msdos" (obvious) and "minix", which is sometimes used for boot floppies because it is more efficient on small file systems than ext2.
		This is because there are two types of floppies I may want to use, those formatted under Linux and those formatted under Windows.
		If the floppy was formatted for Windows, it will fail with an error because it is the wrong file system type.
	www.control-escape.com /linux/lx-mounting.html (1633 words)

Try your search on: Qwika (all wikis)