Will a usb floppy drive be used as drive a on boot up?

Here's my predicament. I have a ECS motherboard that requires a raid drive inorder to recognize my HD (sata connection). Well, The internal floppy doesn't work. The floppy drive itself is fine, so I think it's the floppy connector on the ECS MB that's bad. But I'm loading win xp on and the MB requires the raid driver be installed from drive or it doesn't detect the HD. What sucks is that when prompted for the raid driver, it only says to insert driver disk in drive a: and does not give you the option of installing the raid driver form anywhere else. So, I'm thinking if I get a USB floppy drive that can use that to install the raid driver, as long as the computer recognized the usb floppy as drive a: Is this what will happen??

 

It really depends on the motherboard's BIOS. Just be sure that the BIOS is set to recognize all USB devices and if it gives you the option to boot from a USB floppy drive, then it should work for the F6 driver install in Windows setup. As for the on board floppy controller possibly being bad; have you checked to make sure that it's enabled completely in the BIOS? I've seen some BIOSes (is "BIOSes" even a word?) where there was 3 different places for the on board floppy and all of 'em had to be set correctly for the drive to work: there's the controller itself, there's the drive A: type, and I don't remember the 3rd one (maybe it was only two...). And all the settings are in different sections of the BIOS; the type setting is usually on the main page (set it to "3.5 1.44mb"), and the controller is usually listed under Integrated Devices (look for "On Board FDC" or something similar and set it to "enabled"). Good Luck!

hd2k

 

Geez, you where right. It needed to be enabled in bios. Ya know, I've been building computers for about a decade and I just can't believe I could miss something so obvious, DOH! Thanks.

 

Sometimes the easiest and most obvious fixes are the hardest to find Glad I could help!

hd2k