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Many PCs and servers are shipping without floppy drives these days; some are ordered without CD players. Some computer manufacturers are still furnishing BIOS and other firmware updates in the form of .exe or .img images that create a floppy disk. During installation Windows requires that the installer
provide custom raid or other proprietary drivers on floppy disk -- which requires the purchase of a USB floppy disk. In some cases you can burn a bootable CD and place the floppy files on it but it may or may not work. Sometimes you can place the files on the USB flash drive and this may or may not be recognized as a bootable device. I would like to see a USB flash drive with firmware providing options to emulate a floppy, CD/DVD, or tape drive as required.
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Or better yet, just a chunk of hard drive that emulates the floppy. |
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This is more than baked on just about any non-windows platform out of the box. I can mount a floppy device from any block device, even if its a file on my usb stick, or is my CD-ROM. |
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Well,
something like that does exist, though it is not widely known, there are USB memory sticks with a switch that changes them between full capacity and 1.44 Mb floppy.
Netac, for example, makes them.
As well there are USB sticks that are divided into a "CD-like" volume AND a "HD-like" one.
Unfortunately it is very difficult to find them.
However most of the problems you mentioned can be solved by using Grub4dos as the bootmanager on the stick and let it emulate a floppy disk from an image of the floppy. |
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You can even boot a Mac from a system stored on an iPod plugged into a USB socket, although Apple advise against this. |
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Many modern BIOS support "boot from USB". This is baked. |
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