Comments on: USB Floppy Drive Key provides 2-in-1 storage option

By: Honorable Mentions for Jan 09 : Zogdo

Honorable Mentions for Jan 09 : Zogdo — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 05:03:20 +0000

[...] USB drive that masquerades as a floppy drive for those annoying things like bios updates that still tend to require them. [...]

By: Mark M

Mark M — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 22:54:04 +0000

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.

By: Bootable: HP rolls out 2-in-1 USB media drive | TechFever Network | The Hot Tech News and Gadget Network

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 10:39:16 +0000

[...] [Link] [...]

By: thepirata.com - your daily dose of anything » Blog Archive » USB Floppy Drive Key provides 2-in-1 storage option

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 14:56:30 +0000

[...] Source « Kid Looses Half His Brain/Skull In Shooting [...]

By: Hewlett-Packard USB Floppy Drive Key | Fashion Electronics Guide

Hewlett-Packard USB Floppy Drive Key | Fashion Electronics Guide — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 12:32:55 +0000

[...] Hewlett-Packard’s USB Floppy Drive Key features a 2-in-1 USB media solution that offers the ability to read the USB flash drive as a standard storage device or a floppy device. You just need to connect the USB flash drive to a computer, copy files required onto the USB floppy section and transfer the flash drive over to the selected computer and boot up. You can purchase the 256MB and 1GB models for $49 and $79, respectively. [CrunchGear] [...]

By: The Geeks Of 3D » Other Interesting Weekly News In Brief…

The Geeks Of 3D » Other Interesting Weekly News In Brief… — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 19:06:25 +0000

[...] USB Floppy Drive Key provides 2-in-1 storage option [...]

By: Obed’s Hub

Obed’s Hub — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 14:51:41 +0000

[...] Source: CrushGear [...]

By: pji

pji — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 14:12:37 +0000

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.

By: Geoffrey

Geoffrey — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:28:36 +0000

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.)

By: Hewlett-Packard USB Floppy Drive Key

Hewlett-Packard USB Floppy Drive Key — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:02:03 +0000

By: HP USB Floppy Drive Key - SlashGear

HP USB Floppy Drive Key - SlashGear — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 10:37:28 +0000

[...] [via CrunchGear] [...]

By: USB Gadgets - The HP USB Floppy Drive Key | Geeky Gadgets

USB Gadgets - The HP USB Floppy Drive Key | Geeky Gadgets — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 08:27:07 +0000

[...] Crunch Gear via UberGizmo Share and Enjoy: [...]

By: pji

pji — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 02:16:23 +0000

Or just buy a USB floppy drive for $10…

By: Elijah Grey

Elijah Grey — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 01:17:21 +0000

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.

By: hawk88

hawk88 — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 00:47:39 +0000

I guess I don’t get how its any different from a regular USB drive