Floppy Drives and laptops

[greatman05]

Hey, guys. Anybody know of a way to modify a desktop floppy drive to work on a laptop? I don't have the floppy drive that came with my Toshiba Tecra 8100, so right now I'm pretty much SOL.

 

[vnf4ultra]

Do you need it to be internal? If not, would a usb floppy drive work for you?

 

[MMDominator88]

get a USB to EIDE cable ?!?! (Do they make those??)

 

[Tedster]

Just buy a replacement drive used or new off the internet. Salvage around.
Or - remove the old drive and use an external USB floppy.

 

[greatman05]

I did a BIOS update through Windows 2000 after installing all of the necessary drivers and utilities. It seemed to go fine, and the computer restarted after it was done, without a hitch. When it came back on, it sat for a few moments, reset itself, and didn't come back on again. The BIOS upgrade was going from 2.10 to 2.50. I want to use the F12 BIOS restore feature, but I need a floppy drive, which I don't have right now. Does this utility support using a USB floppy drive?

 

[Tedster]

if your motherboard can boot off a usb device then yes. If not, then no.
Did you read the updating BIOS guide?

 

[greatman05]

I did, but the problem is, I tried to use a USB flash drive with the utility, and it didn't read it: in fact, it didn't look as if the utility had activated the USB port. Since I can't boot the computer (There isn't a P.O.S.T screen or the Toshiba Logo, and the video card doesn't activate unless the utility is executed by pressing F12 before pressing the power button), I can't use a bootable CD, and the Tecra 8100's BIOS recovery program doesn't read from the CD. Is my only option scouring EBay or the internet for a Tecra 8100 floppy drive? If I took the laptop to somewhere like CompUSA, do you think that they would have free access to one of their Tecra 8100 floppy drives onsite?