External floppy drives vs winxp install

[Frank]

Hi all. Has anyone experience or can confirm if this works. With my AN7 MB,
i must press F6 when doing a fresh install of winxp on a sata HD. However,
the installer only allows the driver to be taken from the A: drive. Thus,
would an external USB floppy drive be recognize as a floppy drive A: ?

Even better, could a USB flash drive be used as a floppy drive, or does it
also depends on the usb drive itself.

My main goal here is to have winxp install the sata driver from the floppy,
without the traditional internal floppy drive.
thanks

 

[DevilsPGD]

In message <[email protected]> "Frank"

Hi all. Has anyone experience or can confirm if this works. With my AN7 MB,
i must press F6 when doing a fresh install of winxp on a sata HD. However,
the installer only allows the driver to be taken from the A: drive. Thus,
would an external USB floppy drive be recognize as a floppy drive A: ?

Even better, could a USB flash drive be used as a floppy drive, or does it
also depends on the usb drive itself.

My main goal here is to have winxp install the sata driver from the floppy,
without the traditional internal floppy drive.

My understanding is that it needs to be a "floppy" (although I'm not
sure whether or not a USB floppy will work) -- USB mass storage devices
do not work as of yet.

 

[Jim]

I've lost count how many people insist you do NOT need a floppy drive, I beg
to differ. This is a classic example of why, even after all these years,
you MAY STILL need one, and why no matter what system I build, no matter how
up-to-date, I *ALWAYS* install a stinkin' $7 FDD on every system. Believe
it not, there are STILL occassions when there's no other option. And this
is one of them. Unbelieveable when you think about it, but here we have
Microsoft, and even with their latest OS, you still need floppy disks to
install mass storage devices. SATA drivers have typically NOT been part of
XP, and the MS install will ONLY accept drivers from the A: drive (FDD).
And if all you have available is a SATA HD, you're stuck. I've even tried
to create a bootable CD to circumvent the problem (since this should boot as
A, but still doesn't work. Is it possible to boot a USB drive as A:???
Beats me, haven't seen it done. And to-date, have never seen anyone able to
circumvent this particular problem of SATA drivers w/o a FDD. Ridiculous,
absolutely ridiculous.

Only other option I can suggest is installing on a PATA drive, assuming you
have one, install the drivers afterwards, image copy the partition from the
PATA drive to the SATA drive, then making the SATA drive your boot drive.
Yeah, a hassle, but will work.

Jim

 

[Frank]

Finally found a backdoor solution. Slipstream my winxp cd to add the sata
drivers. I bought a USB drive an even though my board supports USB floppy,
usb cd, sub zip, none were good at substituing a floppy during windows
install. But slipstreaming made a "press F6" free installation. I also took
the time to automate some points of the install and wow, winxp has never
been much easier thanks to this site.
check it out : http://www.maximumpc.com/2005/01/how_to_slipstre.html