dbminter Posted June 26, 2009 Posted June 26, 2009 My new computer did not come with a floppy drive, nor is there a floppy drive controller on the motherboard for me to add one. However, I have seen USB floppy drives in a store here in town. I was wondering if anyone knew if you could boot from these drives with a bootable floppy. I think it depends on if your BIOS supports booting from USB drives, right? I think mine does so, in theory, one of these USB floppy drives should boot from a bootable floppy? Thanks!
mmalves Posted June 26, 2009 Posted June 26, 2009 Yup, if the BIOS supports booting from USB devices it should work like a normal floppy drive. If you don't need the bootable floppy to be writeable you can burn a bootable CD/DVD using the floppy's disk image. Depending on your motherboard it can emulate a floppy from any USB storage device. Just the other day I found out that my motherboard's BIOS does that automatically for any USB storage device smaller than 512MB, but you can also force it to emulate a floppy from any size of USB storage device.
The Lesser Geek Posted July 2, 2009 Posted July 2, 2009 Yup, if the BIOS supports booting from USB devices it should work like a normal floppy drive. If you don't need the bootable floppy to be writeable you can burn a bootable CD/DVD using the floppy's disk image. Depending on your motherboard it can emulate a floppy from any USB storage device. Just the other day I found out that my motherboard's BIOS does that automatically for any USB storage device smaller than 512MB, but you can also force it to emulate a floppy from any size of USB storage device. Ive seen LOTS of BIOS's that have in the BOOT ORDER page an option for USB FLOPPY along with the CD, HDD, NetworkBOOT, and USB HDD settings. IMSI and HP (laptop), HP tower, and Compaq tower. In the old days there were like, two major BIOS's, Phonenix and Award. I would imagine even something slightly older would boot from a USB floppy even without it explicitly having a USB FLOPPY option. Just remember to set the Order of your Boot Settings so that Floppy is before and HDD ( hard disk drive ). If you have a HDD installed with it set higher than your USB FLOPPY (or FLOPPY for older BIOS) It will never boot from your floppy disk. I dont know if IMGBURN will let you make a boot floppy CD or DVD ISO from the settings but I DO know that if you MUST boot into something like dos or the windows 98 preinstall environment you can simply download one and burn it with ImgBurn and it will work for you as long as you can boot from a CD/DVD. An advantage of booting into the windows98 preinstall environment is that it has 1:The MSCDEX.EXE (Microsoft CD Extensions - for dos) or something equivalent so that you can use it to gain access to HDD (fat or fat32 only), Floppy disks, and CD's. No usb support from the win98 preinstall environment unless you have booted from it via the BIOS, or is seen as normal again VIA the BIOS alone. ask me anything. My first CD was over $250 US and was neither scsi nor ide, it attached via its soundcard and used a 'device=' statement in the config.sys and MSCDEX.EXE called for with parameters in the autoexec.bat. It was fun to have cd before even windows supported it. All you could do is read files or play audio CD's. I had a scsi CD burner for about 700 bucks later but it wasnt as nice as the Pinnacle $1000 US cd burner. When win95 came out it was nice to have burning software that came with the burners, but nothing was ever as nice as ImgBurn. why doesn't someone add IMGBURN to the spell check on this website or is the dictionary something that is on my computer?
Recommended Posts