Speaking of Floppies there is a way you can "trick" windows to seeing other drives as "A:\" This is nice for when I'm doing SATA drivers, I can just load them onto my USB


*from Microsoft*

How to assign a drive letter
To assign a drive letter to a drive, a partition, or a volume, follow these steps:
1. Log on as Administrator or as a member of the Administrators group.
2. Click Start, click Control Panel, and then click Performance and Maintenance.

Note If you do not see Performance and Maintenance, go to step 3. Performance and Maintenance appears in Control Panel only if you use Category view. If you use Classic view, Performance and Maintenance does not appear.
3. Click Administrative Tools, double-click Computer Management, and then click Disk Management in the left pane.
4. Right-click the drive, the partition, the logical drive, or the volume that you want to assign a drive letter to, and then click Change Drive Letter and Paths.
5. Click Add.
6. Click Assign the following drive letter if it is not already selected, and then either accept the default drive letter or click the drive letter that you want to use.
7. Click OK.

Ok, I've assigned my flashstick as "A:\" lets see if windows sees it when installing!!!

Tested with Windows x64 PNY 1GB USB 2.0 stick
Put driver in root directory of drive.
Other Misc files are present on drive.

When windows loads drivers hit 'F6' to install additional drivers
After it finishes it will say "press 's' to load drivers"
then it will say: "insert disk into 'A:\' "
*note* I had USB drive in the computer when I started
Select drivers and hit enter


Results: Perfecto! SATA drivers seen and loaded!

Enjoy a simple tip and trick from Dreyco

so does this change it on the computer's bios? would this work with a new hard drive since you won't be able to change the paths from windows?

EDIT: I think you are trying to ask whether you can make the pen drive look like a floppy without ever having windows installed? The answer is you must change the drive letter on a computer that does not have a floppy drive to 'A:\' and then you can plug it into use it on a new machine as a floppy.

Would this start for a copy of Damsn Small Linux, its only 50mb and i'd like to use it as a recovery tool!

I have tried using a USB device for loading drivers, never worked.

I don't understand how you would get this to work when doing a fresh install when all you have is a USB floppy. It never worked for me. But it sounds like it will only work when doing a re-install, or does making the USB device A: flag something on it so other machines will recognize it as such?

EDIT: Im off to test on another machine!!!

Quote: Originally Posted by Dreyco I'm pretty sure it flags the drive as A:\ cause windows looks for the directory A:\stuff.oem and when it sees that the drive is called A:\ it will load it. I mean as long as your computer will read USB on boot (keyboards and such) it will see your pendrive as A:\... I mean my BIOS sees it as a FDD, and that has nothing to do with the OS. Hell, I tried unplugging my HDD with windows on it and it still sees it as a FDD, it must be because it thinks A:\ means floppy! EDIT: Im off to test on another machine!!!

Except that the drive letter isn't stored on the device, if you assign your CD drive as A, the bios isn't going to see it as a floppy. Drive letter isn't static, especially in USB, it mounts as whatever the next avaliable drive letter is. If i boot without my USB hard drive hooked up, my card readers will load as G and H, and my virtual drives'll mounth I through K, and then when i power on my USB HD, it mounts as L. If its on durring boot (which it usually is), it mounts as G.

EDIT and it doesnt carry over to other computer (looking into the possiblity though)