USB Floppy Disk Drive - Store RAID Drivers

PAUL41

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Dec 10, 2009
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Hi I have got 2 Hardrives i am trying to install in a RAID 0 configuration on a P6TD Deluxe motherboard.

The first step involves putting the drivers from the disk on a USB Floppy Disk Drive.

The instructions read as follows;

The motherboard does not provide a floppy drive connector. You have to use a USB floppy disk drive when creating a SATA RAID disk.

Can someone please help and tell me what a USB Floppy disk drive is? I have tried inserting a formatted USB drive into the USB slot but when it goes into DOS and attempts to write it gives me a message please insert formatted floppy into a:

I am confused as what exactly a USB Floppy disk drive is - can someone please help
 

Paperdoc

Polypheme
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They could be using the term for either of two things. One is a USB flash memory unit that can be made to behave as a floppy drive. In general this would require that the BIOS has its own way of making the USB device available and pretending it is a floppy drive (because Windows Install routine cannot do that itself). Read your mobo manual and see if the BIOS does that job. Then you're down to using that capability to Format the "floppy drive" (USB stick) and write the driver files to it.

The alternative is that they mean you need a real floppy disk drive, but its connection is different. Instead of being the original system that required a floppy port on the mobo, this system has a drive unit in a stand-alone external case that connects to the mobo using a normal USB port. For this to work again the BIOS has to help out and make the USB port system available so that Windows can recognize that device as a usable floppy drive. Again, some Windows don't have that built in. So read your mobo manual and see if that is what they mean. If so, you need to buy a floppy drive that plugs into a USB port, and some blank floppy diskettes.
 

Pointertovoid

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Dec 31, 2008
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As Usb is (was?) a sprinkling source of trouble I'd refrain from connecting such an important drive as the floppy on Usb. As a consequence, I have a floppy drive in each computer, and it has a classical ribbon cable.

At least with W2k and Xp, you can provide the Raid driver from other supports than a floppy. For instance a Cd is adequate. I didn't try by myself.
 

Paperdoc

Polypheme
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There is a difference between loading a driver into Windows that is already running so it can access a device, and loading a driver during the Windows INSTALL process. My understanding is that specifically for the INSTALL process, a driver that allows access to and use of a device to install to / boot from MUST be loaded from a floppy drive for any Windows up to and including XP. As of Vista and Win 7, I understand that USB "drives" and optical drives also are available because the Install routines with those versions include drivers for those devices. Furthermore, those two newer Windows also already have SATA / AHCI drivers built in so that these do NOT need to be loaded from an external source to do the install to SATA devices.