Silly Question re: IBM T42 & Lack of Floppy Disk Drive

[Peter_S]

I will be purchasing an IBM T42 2378FVU laptop in the very near future. However, I may have one little glitch in migrating from my old notebook to the T42. And that glitch relates to the lack of a floppy disk drive (about time, I say, for the computer industry to drop that anachronism and its 1.44 MB capacity).

Basically, I have some programs, such as Partition Magic, which I run from 3.5" floppies. Am I correct in assuming I can burn the contents of such floppies to a CD-R and run the software from the CD drive? I would assume so. Also, I have two older programs which perform backups solely to the A drive (the A drive is hard-coded in the the program). How would you suggest I work around that issue?

Any assistance is much appreciated!!

[gb]

I am not sure about T42, but T21 doesn't have build-in floppy drive either. So I bought on e-bay ($15.00) Ultrabay 2000 floppy drive that can be easly swapped with your CD/DVD drive

rgrds

[awolfe63]

I use a $20 USB floppy drive. Works fine.

[Raindrop]

I am not sure about T42, but T21 doesn't have build-in floppy drive either. So I bought on e-bay ($15.00) Ultrabay 2000 floppy drive that can be easly swapped with your CD/DVD drive

rgrds

The Ultrabay 2000 Floppy Drive WILL NOT fit in the slimline bay of the T4x series machines.The drive does fit in the Mini Dock II bay but for some reason my T40 does not recognize it even though my Hardware Management says that the floppy is working?????

You can purchase the USB version and attach it directly to laptop but I would have preferred to use the Ultarabay version personally.

[Peter_S]

.....I do NOT want a floppy disk drive with my new T42 notebook. As I indicated in my initial memo, the floppy disk is really an anachronism in today's world, with its very low capacity of 1.44 MB. I'm pretty sure I can workaround the issue with Partition Magic and other programs, by simply burning the floppy disk images to a CD (a few lines in the autoexec. bat files may need to be changed).

However, the application that backs up files to a "hard-coded" A drive, I'm still unsure. Do IBM ThinkPads offer the capability to assign specific drive letters to partitions and disks? I hope so. That would resolve this issue.

[awolfe63]

They do - just not A or B

[MadeInJapan]

You can use a USB flash memory drive to boot your computer from. There is a program you can download to make the drive bootable. HP puts it out. Do a search on this forum for the information. It works quite well. I use it all of the time (once a week) to Ghost my C drive to a HDD fit in the ultrabay 2000 of my T30. They make a second HDD adapter for your computer too that you can use to do the same thing.