[ Post removed by author. ]

I voted yes for that. Floppy disks are still the best supported format by the BIOS, and are read/writeable by any floppy drive. That makes it easy to test OS's with it. CD's are too impractical as they are write-once (although you could use rewriteables, but more expencive, and takes longer to write to (than floppies), as it has to be erased then written). Also, when do you need 700MB for a small home-made OS?

CD's could be used for the delivering of the final OS, if you include software, media, etc.. But floppies are still amazing for testing of the actual code, and pretty much every machine has a floppy drive.

The next best thing would be booting from a USB Pen Drive. Its very big, and allows writting to without erasing the full thing. The only problem with it is that very little BIOS'es allow booting from USB drives.


So yes, the floppies will still be used for a while longer. Until something as flexible and well-supported comes along.


gunblade

Even when you use a CD, you normally use a floppy image .

Or not, i don´t use floppy emulation because i don´t use the bios for reading disks, and also because with the cd it is possible to load directly
the kernel,without a boot sector or a first stage bootloader.
But the floppy is easier and faster that a cd-rw to record.
I think that now the best option is to use usb flash disks, they are fast and small, the only problem is to make a
pci driver+usb driver + scsi driver + i don´t know.

[ Post removed by author. ]

Unfortunately, my experience also shows that there are MANY PC systems that will not boot a CD in Floppy Emulation but they will very well boot an CD that simply adheres to the "El Torrito" standard with NO emulation.

If you check the CD-ROMS of Windows you will see they use no emulation and they do boot 99% of the machines. WHile i have used CD-ROM floppy emulation in SolarOS and i have many reports of PC not beeing able to boot the CD-ROM version (it happend to me on some of my test machines also).

Anyway the Floppy is the only valid media for testing while you develop your OS. This is because:
-it is easy to use in many emulators and on real PC if you have a floppy
(and as a developer you should have a floppy )
-you can write and read it with ease via the BIOS at startup time
-you can create the image file by simply adding up the BIN files.
-the size is OK untill you need heavy GFX

Using CD-ROMs for testing builds of a hobby OS with many builds/test cycles per day is non-practical.

Using USB memory sticks is also non practical because of the odd and complicated drivers and support applications required for USB. Besides writting much too offten to a USB memory stick will make it fail faster.

Breaking a floppy disk is not the same as breaking a memory stick

For OS releases it is another issue since many today PCs DO NOT have a floppy disk anymore.

As a consequence: a CD-ROM release version doubled by a floppy release for older PCs (and for testing in virtual machines) are usually needed.

Options for HDD install/setup and eventually USB booting will be nice also.

I have well over 25 test PC's and all work with CD floppy emulation, i will admit that some only work with CD-r and others with CD-rw, but i still have no problem booting from CD with floppy emulation, even though i have made a ATAPI driver, still use floppy emulation, if i am using CD to load the drive + kernel etc.

But i still think floppys are the best, for hobby OS dev's.