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Figure 13-7 Cable placement determines the drive letter.

Figure 13-8 Properly installed mini connector

Great! You have installed a floppy drive! Once you have physically installed the floppy drive, it’s time to go into CMOS.

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CAUTION Installing any power connector incorrectly will destroy whatever device is unfortunate enough to be so abused. However, with the exception of minis, most power connectors are constructed so that it’s almost impossible to do so unintentionally.

CMOS

After the floppy drive is installed, you need to configure the CMOS settings, which must correspond to the capacities of the drives. Look in your CMOS for a menu called “Standard CMOS Features” (or something similar to that) to see your floppy settings. Most CMOS setups configure the A: drive by default as a 3½-inch, 1.44 MB drive, so in most cases the floppy is already configured. Simply double-check the setting in CMOS; if it’s okay, exit without changing anything. Figure 13-9 shows a typical CMOS setting for a single floppy drive. On the rare occasion that you require a setting other than the typical 3½-inch, 1.44-MB A: drive, simply select the drive (A: or B:) and enter the correct capacity.

Figure 13-9 CMOS setting for one standard floppy drive

Disabling the Boot Up Floppy Seek option tells the PC not to check the floppy disk during the POST, which isn’t very handy except for slightly speeding up the boot process (Figure 13-10).

Figure 13-10 CMOS Boot Up Floppy Seek option

Many CMOS setup utilities have an option called Floppy 3 Mode Support. Refer to Figure 13-9 to see an example of a CMOS with this option. A Mode 3 floppy is a special 1.2-MB format used outside the United States, primarily in Japan. Unless you live in Japan and use Mode 3 floppy disks, ignore this option.

Flash Memory

Flash memory, the same flash memory that replaced CMOS technology for your system BIOS, found another home in PCs in the form of removable mass storage devices. Flash memory comes in two families: USB thumb drives and memory cards. USB thumb drives are flash devices that contain a standard USB connection. “Memory card” is a generic term for a number of tiny cards that are used in cameras, PDAs, and other devices. Both of these families can manifest themselves as drives in Windows, but they usually perform different jobs. USB thumb drives have replaced virtually all other rewritable removable media as the way people transfer files or keep copies of important programs. My thumb drives (yes, I have two on me at all times) keep backups of my current work, important photos, and a stack of utilities I need to fix computers. Memory cards are very small and make a great way to store data on small devices and then transfer that data to your PC.

USB Thumb Drives

Moving data between computers is always a pain, and even more so since digital photography and multimedia storage have littered hard drives with huge files that won’t fit on a single floppy disk. The latest entry into the floppy disk replacement sweepstakes is a winner: the USB Flash memory drive, also known as the USB thumb drive, jump drive, or flash drive. These tiny new drives are incredibly popular (Figure 13-11). For a low price in US$, you can get an 8 GB thumb drive that holds as much data as 5600 standard 3½-inch floppy disks.

Figure 13-11 USB thumb drives

The smallest thumb drives are slightly larger than an adult thumbnail; others are larger and more rounded. The drives are hot-swappable in Windows 2000/XP/Vista. You simply plug one into any USB port and it appears as a removable storage device in My Computer or Computer. After you plug the drive into a USB port, you can copy or move data to or from your hard disk and then unplug the unit and take it with you. You can read, write, and delete files directly from the drive. Because these are USB devices, they don’t need an external power source. The nonvolatile flash memory is solid-state,