Finally, Death of the 3.5 inch floppy disk
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From: John Tserkezis on 27 Apr 2010 07:07 Stuart Longland wrote: >> The only way to load device drivers (drive interfaces, SCSI drivers >> etc) when installing windows is via the drive at A:. And that's your >> only option. >> Short of creating a magical alternate boot install CD/DVD for every new >> model of box we get. Not looking forward to it. > Actually, rumour has it, this is not the case in the two latest > revisions of their OS. I say rumour as I have not ever tried > installing one of these latest creations -- the one Windows Vista > machine I used had it preloaded, and I've never touched Windows 7. No idea about Vista, but have installed Win7 several times so far, and yes, your only option is F6 to look at drive A:. > But yes, you make a valid point ... and I shall make a note to stock > up on 3.5" floppy disks while they're easily available, as some of the > ones I have at home are slowly decaying with age. Indeed. I've never had much luck with the longevity of 3.5" disks. They simply do not last. And, owning to the fact we don't use them too often, (we get boxs with newfanged interfaces when we're least expecting it) we grab the first disk that's been kicking around in cabinet here. After we go through several bad ones, we throw them out to find there are none left. As I said, we can create a custom boot disk, this is very doable, but we could have that box up and running in several minutes verses lots more. Contrary to popular belief we DO have more important things to do than screw around with installs that don't like to play with the other children.
From: Didi on 27 Apr 2010 07:43 On Apr 27, 2:07 pm, John Tserkezis <j...(a)techniciansyndrome.org.invalid> wrote: > .... > > But yes, you make a valid point ... and I shall make a note to stock > > up on 3.5" floppy disks while they're easily available, as some of the > > ones I have at home are slowly decaying with age. > > Indeed. I've never had much luck with the longevity of 3.5" disks. > They simply do not last. .... Stocking a lot is unlikely to help. Not so long ago I did a final transfer of data I had on floppies from the early 90-s. They were all readable and in good health (some were even from the late 80-s), I moved them to images on newer media (HDD, which I currently backup on DVDs) all right. But when I tried to write to some of them they all failed miserably, even the newest ones. Non-formattable, complete scrap. And some of them had been written just once or twice, so my guess is that even unused new disks will age and become unusable within max. 10 years. As if the brownish magnetic stuff they are covered with dries and hardens over the years and the tiny magnets inside remain stuck forever :-). Dimiter ------------------------------------------------------ Dimiter Popoff Transgalactic Instruments http://www.tgi-sci.com ------------------------------------------------------ http://www.flickr.com/photos/didi_tgi/sets/72157600228621276/ Original message: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.arch.embedded/msg/13a4b9c40be4c51d?dmode=source
From: larwe on 27 Apr 2010 08:04 On Apr 27, 12:23 am, "Mr.T" <MrT(a)home> wrote: > >I explicitly did not include digital downloads for obvious reasons. > > Yes you appeared to be making an invalid point. No, you just seem to be unwilling to think about what I was saying. > How silly, even digital downloads must end up on some "physical media > format", even if it's a hard drive. > And IF you consider vinyl to be analogous to buggy whips, why the silly quiz > in the first place? That's even more ridiculous. You do not buy digital downloads as a sector on your hard drive that is received and glued onto the platter, you buy the information download. You can delete your personal copy and redownload it later. In some cases you never actually download it in the sense of "for storage locally", you just stream it from an online library on demand. By your argument, we should be considering the purchase of CD wallets as part of the CD sales process. And perhaps the purchase of whatever media were used to master the album originally. > >BTW, I refuse to believe the music DVD one - I've never even SEEN a > >music DVD. It's like SACD; it's an acronym, there were/are devices > > Now that's *really* silly. I have about a hundred, and there are *many* > thousands currently available. LOL. I could say the same thing about my collection of 78rpm records. SACD and audio DVD are primarily an attempt by the music industry to get rid of CDs because CDs have no DRM.
From: Spehro Pefhany on 27 Apr 2010 08:55 On Tue, 27 Apr 2010 10:56:18 +1000, the renowned John Tserkezis <jt(a)techniciansyndrome.org.invalid> wrote: >Don McKenzie wrote: > >> Sony announced on April 23rd that they will be discontinuing sales of >> the classic 3.5 inch floppy disk in Japan in 2011. The news marks a >> major end to a nearly three decade history of the disk type that the >> company helped to pioneer. > > Someone forgot to tell microsoft. > > The only way to load device drivers (drive interfaces, SCSI drivers >etc) when installing windows is via the drive at A:. And that's your >only option. My latest machine lacks floppy support on the motherboard (Asus P6T WS). They suggest using a USB flash drive or USB floppy for RAID drivers. > Short of creating a magical alternate boot install CD/DVD for every new >model of box we get. Not looking forward to it. Best regards, Spehro Pefhany -- "it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward" speff(a)interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com
From: John Tserkezis on 27 Apr 2010 09:34
Didi wrote: > But when I tried to write to some of them they all failed miserably, > even the newest ones. Non-formattable, complete scrap. And some of > them had been written just once or twice, so my guess is that even > unused new disks will age and become unusable within max. 10 years. > As if the brownish magnetic stuff they are covered with dries and > hardens > over the years and the tiny magnets inside remain stuck forever :-). Now that you mention it, my experience mimics that too. Long term storage appears to be very much pot luck, but much longer than what I would have though reasonable for floppy media. Writes on the other hand, pretty much all long term age disks proved failure prone in this regard. |