A big fat hardware raspberry

[unixronin]

...to whoever manufactured the floppy drive in vorlon (I haven't bothered pulling it out to check whose it is).  Hint to manufacturer:  It is indeed an excellent idea to use a keyed IDC34 connector on the floppy drive (as you should, and most manufacturers now do) to make sure the data cable is plugged in with the correct polarity.  However, it rather defeats the purpose of the keyed connector if you use a connector that has key cutouts on both sides, allowing the cable to be connected either way up -- and this is ESPECIALLY true if the obvious orientation, using the naturally intuitive orientation of the cable and the visible key cutout, is in fact the wrong one.

(Of course, I should add as a footnote that I've seriously considered removing the floppy drive from the machine altogether, as I'm not sure I can clearly remember the last time I actually used a floppy.  It's probably indicative of how little I actually need a floppy drive that it's taken me from when I assembled vorlon up until now to get around to checking and correcting the orientation of the cable... of course, it's also indicative that it's been this long before I had a floppy disk handy to test and verify the correct orientation with.  I'm sure there's probably more useful things I could use the two exposed floppy-sized bays in this case for.)

Comments

[databeast.livejournal.com]

yeah, the only machine I have a flop;py drive in is my laptop, and thats onle because its not a removable option. havent used floppies since about `97.

if I need to actually 'boot from floppy' I just burn an El Torito bootable CD in floppy emulation mode (BIOS updates mostly).

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, upon consideration I can think of exactly two things I've used floppies for in about the past five years:
(1) copying old DOS/Windows games old enough that they actually shipped on floppies (Lemmings, for example)
(2) Partition Magic 7 didn't have a bootable CD, but had the option to build a bootable floppy for resizing partitions on non-Windows systems.

Actually, I once got around the PM7 issue by running Partition Magic on a Windows install on a VMware virtual machine to resize ext2fs partitions (dismounted filesystems, of course) on a running Linux machine.