AMD64 boot floppies

Torfinn Ingolfsen torfinn.ingolfsen at broadpark.no
Wed Jan 4 15:15:37 PST 2006


On Wed, 04 Jan 2006 07:59:08 -0800 (PST)
Roger Marquis <marquis at roble.com> wrote:

> The problem with floppies is their A) tendency to develop bad
> sectors, and B) increasing rarity.  The lines of code needed for a

A) Yes, but easily countered by fresh for,atting floppies everytime you
     use them. Not a problem.
B) No, USB floppy drives are everywhere. Floppies themselves can be had
     in almost any store (here in Norway at least).

There is another reason why you need a floppy drive around; most
motherboards only supports BIOS updates from either
- windows
or
- a floppy

Heck, my newest mainboard even has a built-in bios update mechanism, but
it wants to load files from the internal floppy, no way to choose device
in that program. Luckily, it also supports update from dos floppy, which
worked nicely with a usb floppy drive.
-- 
Regards,
Torfinn Ingolfsen,
Norway



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