Do I have a floppy disk drive?

[Guest]

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.

 

[Shenan Stanley]

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.

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.

 

[Guest]

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...

 

[gs]

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

 

[Dave B.]

Vista allows F6 Driver install from media other than a floppy.