How can an innocent FDD (Floppy Disk Drive) ruin your day? By not doing its job, that’s how.

I honestly don’t understand why we must still indulge these devices. They were always a pain, but this is 2006 and, although this is just another year, we now have plenty of other devices that can serve all the functions of the modest floppy and with none of its hustles.

To those more sensitive to this time honoured media, the floppy has indeed served us to its best of its abilities over many years; from the big namesake brother (which was truly floppy) to its small incarnation, the 3.5 inch floppy (although much harder, and thus much more durable), this media has done us a world of service. So I say, with all seriousness and respect, isn’t it time we let it rest in peace?

Want something to boot? CDs can do that, ZIP drives can do that, even USB flash drives can do that now with the use of the HP USB Stick format tool and a modern BIOS.

Want stuff to transport from one place to the next? CDs for large files, ZIP drives if you have them (although they still tend to mess up data and break like the floppy disks, admittedly though much much more rarely) or, finally, the USB flash drive.

USB flash drives are my personal favourites. I have two, one 128MB and one massive 1GB which never failed me and always had plenty of space for any job. On the plus side, they are MUCH faster. You just cannot believe how much faster they are to a floppy until you actually use them.

And of course there is always the iPOD or some other portable device that some people will use as a file transfer device, but they are not bootable so I will not mention them any further.

The reason for all this is the journey I embarked upon today; modding my ATi X800 Pro graphics card to unlock all 16 pipes of the core. I had this card for more than half a year now, but I don’t know that much about modding my hardware, which is what a friend of mine, FoRMat MaSTer, does know. He quickly informed me and set me on my quest.

Quick history for those not in the know: X800 cards are based on the same core, the different being the number of pipes in the core (and clock speeds and memory, but the core is the same in all versions). There was no need for ATi to design multiple manufacturing lines for each version, so the same version underwent some modifications to produce different cores. In the case of the X800 Pro, the number of pipes was reduced to 12. But some cores were not hardware limited, they were only given a special BIOS on the graphics card board that did the same job. Change the BIOS and you have the same core as an X800XT

After making sure I did indeed have such a BIOS-only-limited core (by visiting this link you can make sure if you have this core as well) I downloaded my new BIOS and my flashing utility. Those were meant to be copied to a floppy and the floppy tuned into a DOS booting disk (always flashing while on pure DOS, no need to go into too much detail).

But here is what happened:
1. the first disk was OK, booted nicely and I started to make a backup of the BIOS. After the backup succeeded, the system froze! That was an indication that the disk had just died! (there is a complex explanation for why that is what it meant, which I will not bore you with).
2. Second disk wouldn’t format
3. Third disk behaved just like disk No1
4. Fourth disks would not format (like No2)
5. Fifth disk was just as Disks One and Three.

After that, I had vented enough with lots of swearing and gesturing, so I tried to follow the advice of this site to make my system boot from a Flash Drive. I happily found that my motherboard (an MSI: K8N Neo2) did support bootable Flash Drives so I gave that a shot.

Needless to say it worked perfectly!!!

I plan to go tomorrow and buy one more Flash Drive of the lowest space available and fill it with disaster tools and make it bootable. I will then bury my floppy drive in a hollowed ground and pay respects for all the years of service this technology has given me.

Also, the new X800XT might not have the same clocks speeds as a true XT, but it is MUCH faster than before (15% speed increase across the board, that is comparable to a true upgrade!).