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Finally, Death of the 3.5 inch floppy disk

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Good grief, and here I was thinking Microsoft _finally_ got around to fixing that. (I mean, cripes... at least look at a flaming CD fellas?!)

I think USB could be difficult due to the fact that the initial loader (in the case of Windows XP and earlier) started in DOS, loaded the drivers into RAM then kickstarted the NT kernel from there, but one would have thought that on modern systems, the BIOS should still at least allow some access to USB drives. And clearly CD-ROMs are accessible as it loads the rest of the drivers that way.

Never the less, this is just one of many countless examples where floppies are still needed. I guess the general public never have to face the dilemma of getting drivers into a new computer, and thus the floppy drive is seen as a needless relic of the past.

Reply to
Stuart Longland
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Yup, pretty much, a batch file :-)

DOS is so remarkably fast. No grding on hard drives, no wait, it's instant.

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Reply to
Joerg

That can create problems in the truly general case. Think about it: you are loading drivers for an HBA and want to get them from a CD-ROM, potentially attached to that very same HBA...

That would seem the most natural PC way of doing things. I'm not really familiar with the Windows boot process anymore but there has to be _some_ point early on where the BIOS is still readily accessible and kernel modules can easily be loaded.

Of course the most elegant way would be to place basic get-you-home drivers on the device itself. Sun managed this twenty years ago with their OpenPROM system, and that didn't even depend on the CPU since they were written in architecture-independent Forth. However that probably requires the kind of centralised planning and authoritative "this is the way it is going to be done" assertion that is difficult to enforce for commodity x86 hardware. The only time I can see you doing it is with a new bus standard: if e.g. PCIe had demanded it manufacturers would have little wriggle room.

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Andrew Smallshaw
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Reply to
Andrew Smallshaw

That was originally the intention with the IBM PC, e.g. the video card has its own Flash or (EPROM in the old days). Unfortunately it works in real mode only, and standardization for the software interfaces appears to have stopped around 1988. The elderly among us probably still remember Ralf Browns interrupt list.

Reply to
Dombo

I still have it on my server. The windows version (help file) even. But resent the word "elderly" :-)

Meindert

Reply to
Meindert Sprang

OK geriatric

Reply to
SG1

Legacy

Reply to
L.A.T.

There is a way to merge drivers ioto a windows install CD image, ( obviously this required writing a new CDR) AIUI microsoft calls it "slipstream"

I think ACPI is something like that.

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Reply to
Jasen Betts

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