flashing with a floppy instead of usb?

[tombmaker]

I have a dell 8250 ,I have read up on it and it is not capible of booting from a usb drive.Could I flash using a bootable floppy?

[sccrbrandon4788]

yes you can, the only fall back is the reliability of floppy's is not very good. they may fail. i believe i did my first flash with a floppy and it went fine, the newer the better.

[tombmaker]

Thanks for the quick reply.Well I will give it my best shot ....

[sadalius]

You know, every one talks about how un-reliable floppies are. The computer that I use for my projects won't boot from USB devices either so I use floppies. I have two general floppies that I use. One setup for Samsungs and one setup for Benq's. I've used the one I setup for Samsungs for about a year now and I just replaced it. Not because I had to, more of a just in case type of thing. The other one I've been using for as long as the dosflash and firmware for Benq's have been out.

So I think you can reliably use floppies. Especially if your just going to use it just the one time. But you do have to know your system. I've seen some systems that literally eats floppies for breakfast. If you use floppies on a regular basis and have no trouble, then you should be able to count on them. If on the other hand, you have one of those systems that likes to munch on floppies, you might consider borrowing a friends PC to do your project.

[tombmaker]

I just finished flashing my drive.it went very smooth,I did use the floppy .Thanks for the advise..

[Jman 31]

The only problem I've had with a floppy is that everything happens a little slower. You really have to give it time and make sure it is done with its operation. There's a point , I believe it's when your flashing a Sam 28 that it says to reboot the computer but its not done yet. You don't even get time to see this step with a usb flash drive. just my $.02.

[sadalius]

Might be something in the tool that your using there Jman. Not real sure about that. I've always just used the mtkflash commands straight from DOS and I haven't noticed any lag, well, aside the normal takes longer to read/write from floppy.

[CoFree]

make no mistake about.if you are using iprep to do your flash and you are using a floppy.
After the dump it will say reboot your computer.
Don't touch anything.Samtool has not run yet.samtoll will start on it own.it will build your hacked firmware.then will take you back to the C :/.then you are ok to power down. It can take 30 sec or on a slower computer for samtool to start.

it like jman said if you use a usb flash that step goes by very fast.

[sadalius]

iprep isn't anything but scripts, should be easy to edit the script and change it from where it says to reboot the computer to something like, please wait for samtool and once samtool is done, reboot your computer. If your using a USB flash, you won't even notice it, but for those floppy users, it might prevent a bad boo-boo. You might ask whats his name about it or maybe make it an exclusive download for here or something.

EDIT:

Was going to take a look at it myself, but I would need the source code. He's packed it up into an exe instead of using batch files. Nicely packed installer I must say... but that shoots making it an exclusive for here a no go. It probably isn't something that anyone has complained about so he's not done anything to fix it.

[CoFree]

i dont know why it does that ive always though it was crazy to say that.
its been that from the start if he was going to fix it he would have by now.