Creating an ASR backup requires making a bootup floppy
disk. The last two PCs I've had didn't come with floppy
drives, and in fact, the BIOS allows the use of USB-
enabled devices (HDs, CompactFlash, etc.) as primary boot
devices.

Anyone know of a workaround for XP's insistance on the
use of a floppy? I've tried reassigning drive letters and
the BIOS settings, but it seems that the ASR Wizard won't
be fooled ...

AFAIK currently there is no way to do that in XP [unless it is address
in a service pack or something ].

--
Cheers
Check Abdoul [ VC++ MVP ]
-----------------------------------

"Jim Bender" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:221301c38693$fe109540$(E-Mail Removed)...
> Creating an ASR backup requires making a bootup floppy
> disk. The last two PCs I've had didn't come with floppy
> drives, and in fact, the BIOS allows the use of USB-
> enabled devices (HDs, CompactFlash, etc.) as primary boot
> devices.
>
> Anyone know of a workaround for XP's insistance on the
> use of a floppy? I've tried reassigning drive letters and
> the BIOS settings, but it seems that the ASR Wizard won't
> be fooled ...

> "Jim Bender" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
> news:221301c38693$fe109540$(E-Mail Removed)...
> > Creating an ASR backup requires making a bootup floppy
> > disk. The last two PCs I've had didn't come with floppy
> > drives, and in fact, the BIOS allows the use of USB-
> > enabled devices (HDs, CompactFlash, etc.) as primary boot
> > devices.
> >
> > Anyone know of a workaround for XP's insistance on the
> > use of a floppy? I've tried reassigning drive letters and
> > the BIOS settings, but it seems that the ASR Wizard won't
> > be fooled ...
>
> AFAIK currently there is no way to do that in XP [unless it is address
> in a service pack or something ].
>
> --
> Cheers
> Check Abdoul [ VC++ MVP ]
> -----------------------------------

This doesn't exactly solve your problem either, but...

I DO have floppy drives, and consequently can do ASR backups.
I DO NOT, however, trust my complete system backups to a floppy


diskette and I strongly recommend that anyone using ASR backups
read the following carefully. What I do is this:

- ASR backup to a second hard drive (NTFS, of course)
- Let the ASR process create the floppy diskette
- Copy the floppy diskette to an image file on the hard drive
Note: I rename the image file to the same as the .bkf and
give it an .img extension. That way if I have several ASR
backups on the disk I can tell which diskette image goes
with which .bkf file.

When I need to restore from one of these backups, I use the
appropriate .img to create a NEW diskette. I have verified
this process several times and it does work, although it
ain't pretty

What I recommend you do is buy one 3-1/2" floppy drive for
$9 (probably less) and do what I do. But DO NOT trust your
system backups to floppy diskettes! Only Micro$oft would
force an admin to trust his precious system backups to a
piece of media that typically fails in just a few months.

If a little more money is available there are lots of
programs (Ghost for example) that will also solve your
problem, but for < $10 this method is hard to beat.

There is just one "gotcha" -
The tricky bit I left out is that you need a way to copy the
floppy's image to a file on the hard drive. To do this you will
need a program which can read the floppy directly (raw mode)
and copy this to a file. Linux comes with a program that does
the opposite, called "rawrite" - It's for copying linux boot
diskette images to diskettes for booting various configurations
and can be used to re-create the diskette from the image file.
You can also use linux "dd" to create the image files and also
re-create the diskettes from them, but this requires a bootable
linux system with access to the disk drive that contains the
ASR backups. I got tired of looking for an easy way to do this
so I wrote a C program to do it. Hopefully, you can either
find something that will do the trick, or can write something
yourself...

Good Luck
The Messenger