Regrettably, the floppy disk is not dead

I used to have boxes and boxes of floppy disks. Today, I think I have maybe a dozen disks in all, and I would have to do a pretty thorough search to find them all. For the most part, floppy disks are completely unnecessary. I can boot from a CD to accomplish most maintenance tasks. For simple point-to-point file-transfer operations (“sneakernet”), USB flash drives are much more effective. For archiving files, I use writable CDs or, increasingly, DVDs.

In fact, I’d gladly throw away those remaining floppy disks, except that Windows XP still uses them for two essential tasks:

• Creating a Password Reset disk. (If you don’t have one of these, you should. Open User Accounts in Control Panel and then click Prevent a forgotten password in the Related Tasks sidebar.)
• Supplying a system driver during Windows setup. I built a new PC last month with an SATA drive as its system drive, but my Windows XP setup disks didn’t include the proper drivers, and the only way to provide the driver is using a floppy disk. Because that new PC didn’t have a floppy drive, I had to create a custom Windows setup CD with the correct drivers.

Frankly, I’m amazed that both of these legacy operations are still hard-wired to accept only floppy disks as the target. Please, Microsoft, don’t let these restrictions survive in Longhorn!

Update: In the comments, Chris Hedlund mentions that he’s about to put together a similar system and wants to learn more about creating a custom Windows XP install disk that contains the SATA drivers. I did it, and it was surprisingly easy, although you might not think so when you first see the instructions!

Start with this thread from the TechIMO forums. Scroll about halfway down to the post entitled “Install SATA drivers without floppy disk.” Follow the instructions carefully, and be prepared to visit this page at the Elder Geek’s site for instructions. If your copy of Windows XP is pre-SP2, start at the beginning with the Elder Geek’s instructions for how to create a Slipstreamed Windows XP CD Using SP2. The Elder Geek has special instructions for extracting the necessary Microsoft Corporation image file, or you can download it from the link included in the TechIMO Forum post. It sounds daunting, but the actual process is not that bad.