F6 for a storage driver – death of a floppy

While installing our new server today I hit the age old problem of getting the RAID controller drivers installed during setup.

Press F6 when prompted to install a third-party driver

Pressing F6 is the easy bit! For some unknown reason the only way to provide these drivers for windows setup is on a 3.5″ Floppy Disk. (that’s a little square plastic case with a rotating magnetic disk inside for all those under 25!)

First off, my new server doesn’t have a floppy drive. The motherboard doesn’t even have a floppy drive controller into which we could plug a temporary drive!So it was off to find an external USB floppy drive …. Nigel finally un-earthed an old laptop drive from his drawer of useless things!

Then, we had to find a disk. None to be found. Not even in Nigel’s drawer of useless things! Finally we found an aging disk – which didn’t work – nor did the next one – or the one after that! Ahhh … I remember now why we ditched these things about 10 years ago.

Then, the little program from Intel which writes the drivers to the floppy wouldn’t work on my PC – giving me a really useful message :-

Windows Error N. 5
Access is denied.

It’s packaged up using WinImage I think – anyway, I’d come across this problem before and the only solution I have come up with is to run on a Windows 2003 or XP machine instead of Vista.

Finally – I got the drivers installed – only to find that they were the wrong drivers – although that, of course, was no-one’s fault but my own!

So – all told – a 5 minute job took probably the most of an hour. Why Microsoft? Why can’t we have setup read the file from a CD or USB key? This was a problem 5 years ago – and I just can’t believe that 5 years on it’s still a problem.

Perhaps in Windows 2008 ? or 2014 ?