Floppy Disks Nearly Dead?

[FN-GM]

Today i was going to build a new boot disk using netboot disk. Then i started to look for a machine with a Floppy drive. We have no clients with them anymore, they have all been phased out since the making of the last disk. I had to use a server to make the disk.

Then i come to burning the floppy to a CD, our servers dont have burners. Looks like we need to get a external floppy drive

How many machines with floppy drives do you have?

Z

[mullet_man]

You could use WinImage to image the floppy and then burn the image with Nero to CD, I use to do this with Ghost boot disks before I moved to USB.

[rad]

we have usb floppies and had a stage every teacher laptop needed them so have spares of the damn things too.

[elsiegee40]

How many machines with floppy drives do you have?

Z

One now... and that's being retired this summer!

[dhicks]

How many machines with floppy drives do you have?

The older machines that we use as thin clients do, I intend to get them to boot off the floppies at some point as the PXE boot is a bit fiddly. Our older Dell desktops (about 20 to 30 of them floating around the place) have floppy drives, too.

--
David Hicks

[john]

Got many with them left actually, but obviously new ones don't get them and when they expire / break / manged by kids and the rubbish they insert into them they won't and do not get replaced. Also got some USB ones.

[AngryTechnician]

Two.

The bursar has one because until a few months ago one of the decrepit finance packages they can't do without was still issuing updates on floppy. They finally saw the light and discovered this new thing called 'the Internet'. That machine will be replaced this year with one that has no floppy.

I have a floppy drive in my laptop dock for emergencies. The last time I used it was a few months ago to make a BIOS update disk for a student's own laptop that didn't support USB boot. Normally for BIOS updates I would create a virtual disk image using VirtualPC and boot that from USB using grub.

Interestingly, the MS Schools blog had a post today about the fact that young children may have never even seen a floppy disk and will wonder what the Save icon on every menu represents!

[MatthewL]

We sent an email out this week to all our staff stating that they must now start using an encrypted USB stick or saving to the network as floppy disks need to be gone yesterday and they could cause an issue to us as we cannot encrypt them. Im just waiting for the boxes of them to come back for shredding by the company we use. Finally at last they will not be able to use them, they have been phased out slowly as PCs have been replaced.

[Michael]

I still remember when the 3.5" floppy was revolutionary as it held 1.4 Megabytes Incredible. It seems so ancient compared to my 16GB memory stick, but I'm sure that will become out-of-date very soon.

I think the last time I used a floppy was on an RM machine sometime ago. Floppy drives are much harder to find these days, especially in new systems. Still odd though that most motherboards I have seen recently still come with a 34pin connection.