Re: XP Home ruined my floppy drive!
From: D.Currie (dmbcurrie.nospam_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 08/26/04
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Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2004 00:11:12 -0600
"Purple" <vaitkus@pacbell.net> wrote in message
news:d9a19377.0408250955.2df4f606@posting.google.com...
>
> I have about 5 floppy drives in PC's in my house and none of them have
> failed. Some have worked for years although I rarely use them.
>
> My friend has had 3 drives in two computers and all of the drives have
> failed after as little as 1 use. I suppose this could be coincidence
> but it seems extreme to me to suggest some repeatable cause. Since the
> only thing that is the same in both is systems in XP Home, it looked
> like the most likely culprit.
>
> Note that the disks are fine. They work in other floppy drives whereas
> good disks do not work in the failed drives no matter what machine
> they are in.
The ones that have worked for years are older drives, made when floppies
were more important. The ones that failed are new, and I'll bet cheaper than
the old ones.
I've got ancient floppy drives that are still working, and new ones that are
flakey. If you look at a floppy drive that's a few years old and compare it
to a new one, the older one will seem to be better built, sturdier. Take 'em
apart, and you'll find the same differences inside. Newer ones have thinner
metal, more plastic, crummy soldering.
>
> Microsoft has a knowledge base article on their lack of support for
> some floppy drives in XP (so-called tri-mode drives) so I suspected an
> OS problem or perhaps a motherboard problem.
But that problem doesn't kill the drives, and there's a fix for it.
But the same drives that
> worked at first now fail to work in other non-XP machines as well so I
> concluded the floppy drives were toast. A mean-time-to-failure of 1 is
> pretty hard to believe for such an old, stable piece of hardware.
It's old technology and becoming obsolete. Manufacturers don't make much
money off of things like that, so they crank them out in bulk. Like modems,
too. Newer modems seem to fail a lot more now than they did years ago.
They're also a lot cheaper. If you're building a modem or a floppy drive
that you're going to sell for 5 bucks, you aren't going to waste a lot of
quality control or quality parts on them.
>
> Oh well, we will buy more floppy drives and keep trying.
>
> Then again, none of this would even be necessary if Microsoft would
> include SATA and RAID drivers on their install CD.
The reason its not on the CD is that the core OS existed before SATA, and
the drivers aren't created by MS, they're supplied by the manufacturers. If
MS didn't have the drivers when they came out with XP, it's not on the disk.
I suppose they could put them on service packed editions, but I don't know
if they add things like that with later releases.
On the other hand, if your motherboard supports SATA properly, you don't
need to load the drivers. It's just a workaround for systems with an older
motherboard and/or bios where you need to install on the SATA drive. So in
theory the need for those drivers should disappear pretty quickly.
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