As SoCal App says, plus if you have a HD partion with FAT on it, you can access the contents from DOS, Windows 3.x or 9x.

It's been a while since I've used it, but I've booted up some pretty recent hardware into DOS to run Doom over a network.

Basic video and network drivers - plus CD if you need it - is pretty straightforward.

SD

Some outdated avionic equipment still come with floppy disks. Some (young) engineers have complained when they troubleshoot some Collins equipment. They are like "what's this small square for?".
That's the only way to upload some configuration file to these dinosaurs.

I had to go and buy some floppy discs the other day - amazed I could still get them - old stock in WH Smiths £7 for 10, all to reload scsi/sata drivers prior to re-installing XP on a box thats not that old.

Rickity

I threw out several hundred 3½ inch floppies when we moved house. They were full of "irreplaceable" stuff that I hadn't actually used in years. I kept about a dozen "just in case" with stuff like various levels of DOS boot, and a Linux master boot floppy that "unlocks" the old PC by running Fedora 5 on a spare partition.

I bet I never use those either!

I also chucked several boxes of 5¼ floppies with prehistoric stuff on them. I found my old 5¼ drive and connected it up last year, but Windows 7 didn't seem to like it.

The motherboard in this PC says it needs a floppy to install new BIOS, but I've not tried doing that and I doubt I will.

The floppy is heading for extinction, I fear.

I've just been using floppies to boot Ghost over a network - hard disk crash forced a convoluted repair. I discovered it's not easy or straightforward to get a 40GB XP system partition from a 160GB disk onto an 80GB disk, but I managed in the end*.

I find it much easier and cheaper to create a boot floppy (editable, re-usable) than a boot CD, even on CD-RW media.

I've still got a bunch of them (maybe 50 or so), but threw out a couple of shoe-boxes full 10 years ago.

As I say, it's still useful, although Keef is right that it has nearly reached dodo city.

SD

* For anyone interested, I achieved the result by finding a disk imaging tool that allowed the 160GB disk to be cloned to the smaller 80GB disk (Seagate disk tools, based on Acronis), reducing the size of each partition accordingly (providing that the total of used space in each resulting partition could still fit).

I then booted the system with XP CD, ran an install\repair, then mounted the 80GB disk in another system, deleted the non-system partition and used a partition manager to expand the (shrunken) system partition to occupy the entire disk. Job done.

I had previously tried (and failed) to copy the 40GB partition directly to the single 80GB partition on the smaller disk - the clone worked, but would not boot, even after re-writing the boot sector, MBR and XP boot files.

I tried a few other things that I won't bore you with, as they didn't work, although they seemed initially promising.

The last new mother boards I bought didn't even have the 34 pin socket for connecting a FDD. Additionally I discovered that a M/B I purchased about 12 months ago did not have an option for a 5.25 FDD in the bios settings - the 3.5 option was still there.

It seems that they might become extinct of necessity as we all succumb in time to the lust of new machinery.

You can now purchase an external 3.5 FDD with a USB interface, so they won't give up easily. I still a have few old clunkers here with both 5.25 and 3.5 FDD's operational.

And yesterday I interrogated a machine which had only the C Prompt to start with :uhoh:. It was fun though - I was surprised how much I had remembered. ;) And I had a need to use several floppies again (clunk, whir, click, click, click - pure music!).

regards
FOR

Eeeek!!! :ooh: :eek:

If the PC has USB ports and runs XP, Vista or Windows 7 then I's suggest they use a USB stick and SyncToy. But since it has a working floppy disk drive I suspect it's a rather old beast...

LS-120s were great for their time, but the drives only seemed to last about a year before they were struck down by the 'tick of doom' and the disks didn't even last that long.

Cats_Five:
I back up as much as I can find on her machine onto a CD [and also a CD-RW]. The floppy is in her comfort zone, so I don't meddle.

The HP laptop I bought 4+ years ago came without a floppy. Feeling the need, I immediately bought a cheap external USB 3.5-in drive. Weeks later I discovered that one of the sheaf of small papers [printed in gray] which came with the machine was a chit for $50 off on an HP external floppy. TOO LATE.

Floppies are still used as a cheap way of leaving on site backups of Telephone systems! If we started using memory sticks, they would soon start walking as people seem to think they are worth having, but who would steal a floppy?

we used to use hundreds of them on rollouts for getting network connections before blowing the OS onto the machine

I discovered what the Office Worker backs up on the floppies. After she e-mails an address list to the addressing/mailing company, she backs it up on a floppy to keep a record of the recipients of the month's mailing.

I recently cleared out my old floppies - about 15 left from a project I was on in 1999. They'd been bought new and handled with kid gloves as this project was VF important.

Three were still good.

Luckily, they'd been backed up many years ago onto different media, but I'd have been quite upset to have lost the code.

SO