If you’re a sysadmin, you may have noticed a somewhat annoying trend: computers — especially servers — rarely ship with floppy drives any more, and yet BIOS updates still often require that you boot from a floppy disk! Sure, you can jump through hoops and place a bootable image onto a normal USB memory stick, but that can be complicated and time consuming. The HP USB Floppy Drive Key provides a 2-in-1 USB media solution that presents to the host comptuer a normal USB storage device and a USB floppy device! Simply connect the USB key to a computer, place the files you want onto the USB floppy, and then move the key over to the floppy-less computer and boot. No need to hang onto a dedicated USB floppy drive, and one more reason to ditch all those old floppy disks you’ve been hanging onto since your Windows 3.1 days.
Available from HP in 1 GB and 256 MB models for $79 and $49, respectively.
I guess I don’t get how its any different from a regular USB drive
It’s much more expensive and a huge rip-off. That’s what’s different. You could just make a bootable USB drive that does this using a cheap USB drive and an open source thing like busybox. That’s all this is.
Or just buy a USB floppy drive for $10…
The point is that some servers / computers will refuse to boot from a bootable USB drive, because the device does not say it’s a Floppy Drive, but something else. The problem is not with the USB drive, but the server / computer not being able to boot from the device.
This spoofs the device type to appear to be a Floppy Drive, which most devices should boot from – including hardware that won’t boot from a normal USB drive. By spoofing the device type, it fools the host computer into booting, as well as offering more drive space than a 1.44 MB floppy. (A colleague was just advised by Dell to put a 2.0 MB file on a 1.44 floppy to flash his BIOS. That’s the kind of thing this drive is for.)
I call bullshit on that. Over the past 10 or so years of usb most older devices will ONLY recognize a usb floppy and completely ignore thumbdrives, usb cdroms, etc. and especially these hp combo drives.
This drive, or earlier versions of it, used to ship with HP servers and it NEVER worked.
Dell customer service may be populated with stupid people but the group that puts the firmware together are in a different league. They either make floppy or windows gui versions of a ~100k bios load, anything more than that would be a 600mb firmware iso.
So, in summary, A usb drive that can emulate a fd with more than 1.44mb is rather useless because nobody makes a bootable fd image larger than that and you had a 10% chance of booting with the older version of this drive.
To the guy who “called bullshit on that”. The images are 500K+ and if you’re upgrading both the BIOS and BMC on a Dell 2950 like I did last night you don’t have space for both the BMC firmware and the bios image on a single disk (including DOS boot files) so you need to split it into two disks.
I ordered this today. Will let you know if it’s “bullshit” or not.
Mark.