this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2025
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The installing Windows 20 years ago panel is missing the bit where you have to push F6 and have a floppy disk handy with the drivers for your storage device. Yes, an actual floppy disk. Ditto for all the other drivers (video, sound, network, etc.) that you usually had to install once you were booted into the OS.
May I remind you that 20 years ago was actually 2005? What you are referring to was more like 30 years ago.
20 years ago you needed to search the web and download all the drivers AFTER the windows install then install all of those.
I don't miss that time. Especially on laptops that weren't supported by the manufacturer and you had to hunt for individual drivers.
Today that only happens if you run Linux and have an Nvidia card. Especially one that's not supported by the newest driver version anymore.
30 years ago, Windows 95/98 (not sure about things like NT4) would just fall back to going through the BIOS to access the disk. It was slow, but it worked, and you could install Windows and then install your storage drivers later. Needing to push F6 and install your storage drivers during the install was a Windows 2000/XP thing.
I skipped 2000, but I installed XP a lot of times and I never had to insert a floppy. IDE and SATA drivers were preloaded, maybe you had some really weird storage system?
It was probably a combination of using the motherboard RAID and AMD motherboards to boot.
Microsoft also updated their Windows XP install disk a few times over the years. If you were installing from an original launch disk from 2001 on a PC with 2006 hardware it was quite a different experience than with a disk that already had SP3 and a bunch of newer drivers.
Yeah, that's rather obscure hardware. I can imagine that you need some drivers for that.
Btw, while this dialog asked for a floppy, it actually used the regular file system, so a CD or even an USB drive worked as well.
I think with cheaper consumer desktops using IDE hard drives, that worked out of the box, but some more exotic storage configurations (SCSI, anything to do with RAID) were a little bit harder to get going.
Isn't that a bit more than 20 years ago?
A realistic memory (set to music) of Windows technologies