I never considered building a retro rig without a floppy drive. I have plenty of them and usually the cases will otherwise have a hole in one of the external 3.5in slots if I remove it (as I got almost all pc cases second hand somehow and only more modern systems came without a floppy drive installed), so I might as well install one.
Also I would miss the drive seek sound when booting 😜

The only pre P4 era PC I didn't have a floppy drive actually connected was a P3 Coppermine s370 build, because the floppy drive controller on that board was dead. Might still have put a 3.5in FDD in there to fill in the spot though but I don't remember.

I always have at least one floppy drive installed on older computers. Mainly for nostalgia and "authentic" look, but also for compatibility reasons. 😀

And some just refuse to believe the floppy drive isn't present.

For example, in the BIOS there are no drives at all (this system is booted and runs entirely from the network):

Meanwhile Windows 95 insists there is a floppy drive:

There is a patch for that:
http://lonecrusader.x10host.com/rloew/nofloppy.html

Personally I can't withstand a DOS machine without floppy drives. Specifically 2! One at least being a 5.25" ... yeah I know that's too strict.. but to me the sound of two drive seeks followed by a single short beep is what registers in my brain as a DOS machine booting. This was how I always knew PCs (since our first XT), so it's burned in now 😅

Gotek solves the functional problem, but can't fill in the experience 🙂

I tend to use a Gotek these days, but mine has the optional piezo speaker inside that simulates the seek noise - it's a bit weak but better than nothing!

Once bootable CDs came out, I only kept a single usb floppy drive around for compatibility with any older system I might have to work on. It seemed like I was doing the right thing because floppy disks were an unreliable legacy resource that was best left as a memory and wasn’t something you wanted to rely on because the disks would fail, the drives would fail, fail fail fail. Of course I also lived with smokers and cats at the time.

Once I broke out the old boxes in 2019, I realized that I needed a floppy drive again and none of my old usb floppy drives were reliable enought to make disks readable by the old traditional floppy drives from storage. Took a while to build a “bridge” PII system that was new enough to read usb storage and robust enough to write disks that were generally readable on isa controllers.

There was some nostalgia to hear the drives whir buzz and click, but it was lost in the swamp of frustration as I seperated out bad disks from bad drives from bad controllers. Assuming, of course, that the problem isn’t because you enabled the L1 cache on your cyrix chip or something esoteric like that.

So floppy drives are more of a necessary evil than a beloved past time or a robust method of archiving software for me. I still get a little thrill when an old system creaks out its first drive seek in 25 years, but it’s tempered with the gloomy feeling that the drive is likely a little bit out of alignment, the heads are probably dirty, and the crystal may need a defibrillator. They are the least reliable part of a legacy build. (well at least if you are using a new powersupply)

So the legacy system probably has a floppy disk attached at my house, but the hard drive was probably formatted and loaded on another system with an imaging tool and not from a stack of floppy disks. This probably all goes back to the days when my job required me to take a stack of floppies around to each PC in the computerlab to upgrade them to WP51. I had a network install worked out before the end of the month.

Jo22 wrote on 2023-04-21, 17:23:

Hello everyone,

Did you ever consider building a little retro/vintage PC, but without inatalling a floppy drive?

You may want to reconsider that.

i have two 'motherboard in a box' 32bit PCs without floppy drives

as Davidrg said the bios insists on it existing and then during boot give errors but allow continue

the computers themselves works fine, the OS never seeming to miss the floppy (or even acknowledge that its missing). I guess they do deserve a proper case with FDD though!

what it reminded me of is how little i ever use floppy disks now, just for booting up really. it reflects that nearly all the hardware i have now is at least usb 1 ready, just a couple of pentium era machines without usb

i have probably 80 or so floppy disks, i'm guessing 50-60 will still work - thats a lot of boot disks, hopefully enough - but then there is always gotek if needed

Even my main PC, a Quad Xeon,have floppy drives, in fact both 5" and 3", but at lease i need 3" floppy in a computer

Turn this on its head: the OSs that absolutely require a floppy drive are corner cases. Back in the day you needed the drive for file transfer, but with NICs and FTP, not to mention CF cards, that is not necessary any more.

Let's forget about the drive itself for a moment and look at the controller. It hogs an IRQ line and DMA channel. Both are at a premium in DOS systems. If it's possible to move anything else into IRQ 6, DMA 2, that frees up space for other devices.

Now, big "if", but I'm tempted to take a look if something would accept them...

I have to have a floppy drive in anything under where the BIOS allows a bootable CD. So that is XT, 286, 386, 486, Pentium, etc.
For those who use a Gotek you are still technically using a floppy drive, though an emulator one, it serves exact same purpose 😀

I’ve come across drivers that have a custom self-extractor that demand to write to the A: drive. It’s true you don’t often need a floppy drive but they are occasionally handy.

Horun wrote on 2023-05-05, 00:54:

I have to have a floppy drive in anything under where the BIOS allows a bootable CD. So that is XT, 286, 386, 486, Pentium, etc.

the moment a BIOS can boot from USB it's all over for floppy and optical drives

well not quite, but it does mean that we don't need the FDD and optical drive

if using IDE to SD or CF in older PCs we also don't need 3.5' HDDs

we can end up with hardware arrangements quite different from how things would have been, with emulations to fill gaps, or gaps just ignored

For practical reasons, I don't need FDD for a long time, but for nostalgia and for the chance to read old files on floppy disks from a long time ago, I had it last with the Phenom II setup. For the same reasons, I have a CD/DVD drive on my PC even today.

I have floppy drives in a bunch of my retro systems, purely for case cosmetic reasons so as not to leave a hole. 🤣

I pretty much never use actual floppy disks on any of my PCs though, as I have an abundance of ethernet cards for easier file transfer. Last time I set up DOS on 1 of my builds, I just temporarily connected a Gotek until the OS was installed.

The only system in my collection where the floppy drive is still useful is my Amiga 1200, where I have a boot disk that I can use to boot an alternative CD32 emulator than the 1 installed on the internal CF card. It's more practical in that case to use an actual floppy disk, rather than a Gotek for 1 disk image.

I've mostly moved over to Gotek. cheap, fast and reliable. Only my childhood PC did I miss the seek sound on boot so switched back to a real FDD.
Also where cases have a FDD "Labia" it seems wrong not to put a drive behind it.

But if a motherboard has a FDD header I'll add a Gotek, just as I'll include an optical drive even though mostly I'll use a virtual drive or transfer over the network, sometimes it's just more convenient.
My 9x and below PC's rarely use the drive, it's actually the newer NT based OS's that need AHCI or RAID drivers during install where I mostly use mine. Its more convenient to copy the required drivers onto my "Gotek USB" then burning another CD with the required drivers.

Ydee wrote on 2023-05-05, 09:36:

For practical reasons, I don't need FDD for a long time, but for nostalgia and for the chance to read old files on floppy disks from a long time ago, I had it last with the Phenom II setup. For the same reasons, I have a CD/DVD drive on my PC even today.

Which board did you use for your Phenom II setup?
My next build is gonna get an optical drive, if only because my current (temporary) system doesn't have one and I still like to go watch a DVD movie from time to time.

chinny22 wrote on 2023-05-05, 09:48:

I've mostly moved over to Gotek. cheap, fast and reliable. Only my childhood PC did I miss the seek sound on boot so switched ba […]
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I've mostly moved over to Gotek. cheap, fast and reliable. Only my childhood PC did I miss the seek sound on boot so switched back to a real FDD.
Also where cases have a FDD "Labia" it seems wrong not to put a drive behind it.

But if a motherboard has a FDD header I'll add a Gotek, just as I'll include an optical drive even though mostly I'll use a virtual drive or transfer over the network, sometimes it's just more convenient.
My 9x and below PC's rarely use the drive, it's actually the newer NT based OS's that need AHCI or RAID drivers during install where I mostly use mine. Its more convenient to copy the required drivers onto my "Gotek USB" then burning another CD with the required drivers.

I personally wouldn't spend money on a Gotek for a PC. I use the disk drive only for installation and I don't mind using a real drive for this one time. And I have a box full of them 😀
Unlike with the Amiga where using disks is part of the daily business.

Tetrium wrote on 2023-05-05, 12:29:

Which board did you use for your Phenom II setup?
My next build is gonna get an optical drive, if only because my current (temporary) system doesn't have one and I still like to go watch a DVD movie from time to time.

This one: https://www.asrock.com/mb/amd/a770de+/index.asp
It was the last board that had a FDD connector (my next build was on the ASRock Z68 Extreme3 Gen3, which was already FDD connector missing).