5 ms·

I was blown away when the Windows XP installation process required me to find a 3.5" floppy for storage drivers.

by none_to_remain 3y ago

p_l 3y ago
Because on PC, the FDC is probably the only storage component you could be sure to address at one time.
- sambazi 3y ago
  because early pc's often completely ran of floppy disks as hdd's were expensive
  - Bene592 3y ago
    XP wasn't that early. IDE worked out of the box. But if you had a RAID setup or something else that needed a driver (early SATA?) you could load the driver there
  - orthoxerox 3y ago
    By the time XP was released no one ran their systems off floppies. A floppy was still the most common removable medium, though.
- bonton89 3y ago
  This process was super cumbersome since floppy disks were well on the way out even when XP was introduced and by the end of its life they were gone. Floppy is the only universal driver the installer can count of having for storage media, besides the media it installing itself. I always thought it would be smarter if this process allowed you to insert a CD temporarily in the same drive keeping the installer in memory.
  - paledot 3y ago
    Windows XP required a minimum of 64 MB of memory. The installer must not only fit in that space, it must be able to run at the same time. Not an impossibility, but a much taller order than running the same/a previous version of the OS directly off the disk. I have definitely used OS installers that allowed/required CD swaps, though. Maybe Ubuntu at one point? Now that's a slick setup process. Opening Firefox to read the orange site while your OS installs on the same computer is a great trick.
- nullindividual 3y ago
  Back when NT 3.1 and 4.0 were mainstream, and where this storage driver on floppy process originates from, absolutely. By the time XP rolled around, CDROMs were common place.
  - p_l 3y ago
    NT always installed from CDROM. The floppy loading process is because all platforms then could be relied upon to have some form of floppy from which you could install whatever custom HAL.DLL and storage driver for your specific controller that wasn't included in install media, for example any kind of HBA that was newer than your OS release. The older style alternative was to wait for special "hardware update" release of the operating system you wanted to install.
    - nullindividual 3y ago
      Yes, I said that. Storage drivers needed to reside on floppy. I never said anything about NT not installing from CD. I've installed NT4 god knows how many times. I'm very familiar with the process.
      - p_l 3y ago
        ah, it wasn't clear to me, so I just wanted to point out exactly what the floppy was supposed to pass to the system. NT4 was magical, I remember reading on the jewel case "for 386, Pentium Pro, MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha" or something like that, and the instructions on how to boot the installer - with only PC referencing a boot disk (and having done so before ElTorito that was truly magical for me)
Zardoz84 3y ago
on my case, I need to install Windows 3.1 and then update to 95 and then update to 98. Windows 95 and 98 update editions
- bombcar 3y ago
  I remember discovering that you could do a fresh install of XP or 98SE on a blank drive from CD from the upgrade media. At some point it would eject and ask you to put in the Windows you were upgrading from, and you could just put the same CD back in and it happily counted it.
Dwedit 3y ago
Yeah, you had to slipstream in the storage drivers if you had no floppy drive.
- xattt 3y ago
  > slipstream The vocabulary that people came up with in a time of Star Trek: Voyager and Fast & the Furious…
globular-toast 3y ago
I had a floppy drive in my PC for that sole reason since I also had a SATA disk which was a new thing at the time. Later learnt to build a custom CD and include the drivers in it, but it wasn't long then until I switched to Linux anyway.
lb1lf 3y ago
...not to mention the 'Aaaaarrrgh!!!!' moment I had when finding that the brand spanking new network adapter I had purchased during my student days had no floppy with drivers in the box. Oh no. The manual stated I could simply go online to find the required drivers on the new-fangled world wide web. Which, incidentally, was why I had bought the adapter in the first place.

I was blown away when the Windows XP installation process required me to find a 3.5" floppy for storage drivers.

p_l 3y ago

Because on PC, the FDC is probably the only storage component you could be sure to address at one time.

sambazi 3y ago
because early pc's often completely ran of floppy disks as hdd's were expensive
- Bene592 3y ago
  XP wasn't that early. IDE worked out of the box. But if you had a RAID setup or something else that needed a driver (early SATA?) you could load the driver there
- orthoxerox 3y ago
  By the time XP was released no one ran their systems off floppies. A floppy was still the most common removable medium, though.
bonton89 3y ago
This process was super cumbersome since floppy disks were well on the way out even when XP was introduced and by the end of its life they were gone. Floppy is the only universal driver the installer can count of having for storage media, besides the media it installing itself. I always thought it would be smarter if this process allowed you to insert a CD temporarily in the same drive keeping the installer in memory.
- paledot 3y ago
  Windows XP required a minimum of 64 MB of memory. The installer must not only fit in that space, it must be able to run at the same time. Not an impossibility, but a much taller order than running the same/a previous version of the OS directly off the disk. I have definitely used OS installers that allowed/required CD swaps, though. Maybe Ubuntu at one point? Now that's a slick setup process. Opening Firefox to read the orange site while your OS installs on the same computer is a great trick.
nullindividual 3y ago
Back when NT 3.1 and 4.0 were mainstream, and where this storage driver on floppy process originates from, absolutely. By the time XP rolled around, CDROMs were common place.
- p_l 3y ago
  NT always installed from CDROM. The floppy loading process is because all platforms then could be relied upon to have some form of floppy from which you could install whatever custom HAL.DLL and storage driver for your specific controller that wasn't included in install media, for example any kind of HBA that was newer than your OS release. The older style alternative was to wait for special "hardware update" release of the operating system you wanted to install.
  - nullindividual 3y ago
    Yes, I said that. Storage drivers needed to reside on floppy. I never said anything about NT not installing from CD. I've installed NT4 god knows how many times. I'm very familiar with the process.
    - p_l 3y ago
      ah, it wasn't clear to me, so I just wanted to point out exactly what the floppy was supposed to pass to the system. NT4 was magical, I remember reading on the jewel case "for 386, Pentium Pro, MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha" or something like that, and the instructions on how to boot the installer - with only PC referencing a boot disk (and having done so before ElTorito that was truly magical for me)

Zardoz84 3y ago

on my case, I need to install Windows 3.1 and then update to 95 and then update to 98. Windows 95 and 98 update editions

bombcar 3y ago
I remember discovering that you could do a fresh install of XP or 98SE on a blank drive from CD from the upgrade media. At some point it would eject and ask you to put in the Windows you were upgrading from, and you could just put the same CD back in and it happily counted it.

Dwedit 3y ago

Yeah, you had to slipstream in the storage drivers if you had no floppy drive.

xattt 3y ago
> slipstream The vocabulary that people came up with in a time of Star Trek: Voyager and Fast & the Furious…

globular-toast 3y ago

I had a floppy drive in my PC for that sole reason since I also had a SATA disk which was a new thing at the time. Later learnt to build a custom CD and include the drivers in it, but it wasn't long then until I switched to Linux anyway.

lb1lf 3y ago

...not to mention the 'Aaaaarrrgh!!!!' moment I had when finding that the brand spanking new network adapter I had purchased during my student days had no floppy with drivers in the box. Oh no. The manual stated I could simply go online to find the required drivers on the new-fangled world wide web. Which, incidentally, was why I had bought the adapter in the first place.