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Comment by p_l | Hacker News Reader

Because on PC, the FDC is probably the only storage component you could be sure to address at one time.

This process was super cumbersome since floppy disks were well on the way out even when XP was introduced and by the end of its life they were gone.

Floppy is the only universal driver the installer can count of having for storage media, besides the media it installing itself. I always thought it would be smarter if this process allowed you to insert a CD temporarily in the same drive keeping the installer in memory.

Windows XP required a minimum of 64 MB of memory. The installer must not only fit in that space, it must be able to run at the same time. Not an impossibility, but a much taller order than running the same/a previous version of the OS directly off the disk.

I have definitely used OS installers that allowed/required CD swaps, though. Maybe Ubuntu at one point? Now that's a slick setup process. Opening Firefox to read the orange site while your OS installs on the same computer is a great trick.

Back when NT 3.1 and 4.0 were mainstream, and where this storage driver on floppy process originates from, absolutely.

By the time XP rolled around, CDROMs were common place.

NT always installed from CDROM. The floppy loading process is because all platforms then could be relied upon to have some form of floppy from which you could install whatever custom HAL.DLL and storage driver for your specific controller that wasn't included in install media, for example any kind of HBA that was newer than your OS release.

The older style alternative was to wait for special "hardware update" release of the operating system you wanted to install.

Yes, I said that. Storage drivers needed to reside on floppy. I never said anything about NT not installing from CD.

I've installed NT4 god knows how many times. I'm very familiar with the process.

ah, it wasn't clear to me, so I just wanted to point out exactly what the floppy was supposed to pass to the system.

NT4 was magical, I remember reading on the jewel case "for 386, Pentium Pro, MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha" or something like that, and the instructions on how to boot the installer - with only PC referencing a boot disk (and having done so before ElTorito that was truly magical for me)

because early pc's often completely ran of floppy disks as hdd's were expensive

XP wasn't that early. IDE worked out of the box. But if you had a RAID setup or something else that needed a driver (early SATA?) you could load the driver there

By the time XP was released no one ran their systems off floppies. A floppy was still the most common removable medium, though.

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