Booting Off A Floppy Disk
| Field | General Computer Use |
| Went Obsolete | late 1990s |
| Made Obsolete By | Internal Hard Drives, Burnable CDs?, Bootable CD Drives, BIOSes that will boot from USB. Manufacturers who stopped assembling computers with floppy drives |
| Knowledge Assumed | Minimal |
| When useful | When using a very old computer, or when newer boot methods (CD, DVD, PXE) are not available or convenient |
Insert a floppy disk and press the power button. Watch the computer run off the floppy. This is how it used to be done before internal hard drives became feasible to use. Even though the floppy started to go out of style with internal hard drives, there were some occasions when a floppy was handy, such as a corrupt hard disk and you needed to run a simple utility to fix it. Just boot your utility off a floppy, and viola! your system worked.
One thing the floppy disk is still used for is updating the BIOS on motherboards, though some have gone to bootable CD images.
Also, even Windows XP would require you to load RAID or SCSI drivers for hard drive controllers that did not have built in support. The windows installer will only accept these drivers from floppy disk.
Microsoft Windows requires that RAID/SCSI drivers come on floppy during the installation. If you are building a computer that uses RAID/SCSI as the main boot drive, to be able to install Windows, you need your RAID/SCSI drivers on a floppy disk and a floppy disk drive in the computer. It will not accept the RAID/SCSI drivers any other way. But that is not booting from a floppy, it just happens to require the drivers on a floppy drive.
One more legitimate reason to boot off a floppy is if you need to read/write your main boot partition. Alternative would be to use a boot CD instead.
This is most definitely not obsolete. There are a lot of systems, especially servers and embedded systems, where a floppy is all you have.
