Format a 256M USB drive as a floppy diskette

[Man-wai Chang]

How could I format my USB drive such that it could be treated as drive A
during Windows XP installation? I meant is there a way to create a 256M
floppy diskette out of a USB drive?

 

[John John]

If you are wanting to do this because of the F6 driver issue the answer
is that it won't work.

John

 

[Man-wai Chang]

If you are wanting to do this because of the F6 driver issue the answer
is that it won't work.

yes, it's intended for the F6 thing.
I am using HP USB Tool to set the Sony 256MB as a floppy diskette. WinXP
could recognize it as a floppy when pressing F6 during installation.
Even the BIOS could detect the USB stick as a floppy drive.

But HP's tool is proprietary. I was thinking about an open-sourced,
Micro4oft or whatever tool.

I suppose there should be a standard for this kind of thing....

 

[John John]

yes, it's intended for the F6 thing.
I am using HP USB Tool to set the Sony 256MB as a floppy diskette. WinXP
could recognize it as a floppy when pressing F6 during installation.
Even the BIOS could detect the USB stick as a floppy drive.

But HP's tool is proprietary. I was thinking about an open-sourced,
Micro4oft or whatever tool.

I suppose there should be a standard for this kind of thing....

The drivers *must* be supplied on a floppy diskette. The setup program
will not accept them from any other media source.

Limited OEM driver support is available with F6 during Windows XP and
Windows Server 2003 setup
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314859

You may be able to use a USB floppy drive but only a handful of drives
are supported for F6 driver installation:

A connected USB floppy disk drive does not work when you press F6 to
install mass storage drivers during the Windows XP installation process
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/916196

Another alternative is to incorporate (slipstream) the drivers into the
installation cd.

John