HP's USB Floppy Drive Key allows BIOS installation

Posted by John Brownlee, October 24, 2008 5:30 AM | permalink

There's no tingle of excitement to be felt anymore when staring at yet another USB flash drive, but HP's new USB Floppy Drive Key does, at least, have one standout feature the rest don't have.

Let's say you have a BIOS update to install... the sort of thing that can often only be done from an obsolete, antediluvian floppy drive that has long since become home to a friendly family of spiders. Simply flip a switch to toggle the USB Floppy Drive Key into "boot from floppy mode", copy the BIOS files over and update with no fuss.

It's clearly aimed at sys admins, and the price reflects that: $49 for 256MB and $79 for the 1GB version. No one who isn't getting corporate to pay is going to spend that when they can do the same thing using a regular USB stick and any one of a number of open source programs. Still, props to HP for doing something, anything new with gadgetdom's most flotsam of tech.

HP USB Floppy Drive Key [HP via Slashgear]

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Discussion

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#1 posted by Anonymous , October 24, 2008 6:20 AM

I've seen a utility on HP's web site that turns *any* USB flash drive into a bootable device. I think it just puts the correct superblock for a FAT file system onto the drive and a little bit of DOS. Cheaper than buying a "special" device, that's for sure!

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#2 posted by SeppTB , October 24, 2008 6:46 AM

My motherboard allows for any USB drive to act as a bootable drive (So long as its formatted as FAT), the setting is right there in the BIOS (Boot from removable drive). I'd have to imagine most modern motherboards have similar options, as I by no means sprang for a top of line one.

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#3 posted by Reed Savory , October 24, 2008 9:34 AM

The almost mind-numbingly moronic part about this is that HP will not provide BIOS update floppies for their own PCs (see previous BBG article at http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/07/30/hp-suggests-400-repa.html).

So they’re now selling a product, for which they won’t provide the tools to use, on their own line of computers.

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#4 posted by north , October 24, 2008 10:02 AM

It's not about booting, and I can give a flip about BIOS updates.
I'd get one of these if you can use it for RAID drivers during windows installs.
The infamous "Press F6 is you need to install 3rd party RAID drivers...".
This is more common than you'd think, especially when installing XP on a systems that came with Vista preinstalled.

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#5 posted by Anonymous , October 25, 2008 12:37 PM

While these aren't all that useful anymore, since most modern systems can boot and bios update from USB devices of just about any kind, and XP was the last to require the floppy drive for special drivers, they are genuinely different from ordinary bootable USB drives. This little widget's firmware is such that it actually reports itself to be a USB floppy drive. Not useful in many instances; but sometimes important.