Do I have a floppy disk drive?

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I'm hoping this is the right place to ask. I can't find my drive for my
floppy disk. It's actually hard, but I think it's called a floppy. Clearly
technically incoherent. Apologies.
 
katie said:
I'm hoping this is the right place to ask. I can't find my drive
for my floppy disk. It's actually hard, but I think it's called a
floppy. Clearly technically incoherent. Apologies.
Click to expand...

Your computer - if new (last 3-5 years) - may not have a floppy diskette
drive.

You may indeed have 3.5" floppy diskettes (they are enclosed in a protective
outer shell and may be labeled in various ways - 1.44MB, 720K, FDD, etc...)
but without the (essentially) obsolete floppy diskette drive itself - you
cannot utilize them.
 
The descripton is accurate, after all CDs are laser discs, but using one
doesn't burn a hole in you! It refers to the innards of the device.

"Floppy" refers to the disk itself which is nonrigid, and is pinched between
the reading-heads to hold it in one place while the data is extracted. It's
basically a sheet of magnetic tape, same stuff as you'd find in a cassette.

Hard-disks OTOH are made of glass or aluminium and are self-supporting. The
heads don't in fact contact a hard-disk, they 'fly' a few microns above its
surface owing to the head having an aerofoil shape.

Perhaps the greatest paradox is that to install a Serial-ATA hard-disk you
need a floppy drive. Yet, you generally find SATA disks in new computers. The
same ones that don't have...
 
sure hope they totally move away form floppy like allowing device drive to
be read from a USB device during OS install and allows allow writing
"emergency repair disk' or boot disk to either CD or USB device.

Linux supposed can use CD instead of floppy
 
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