I know that this si not exactly the right forum for this question but...do mother boards them selves need drivers....?

the software to control the motherboard, disk drives, standard keyboards, mice and ports is built into the bios. cheers tacitus

sooo...if I were to buy a used 3.5" floppy drive..i wouldnt need to have to get drivers from a web site....??.....or how about a cd-rom....i installed 1 on my pc and it came with drivers for it....?? so it doesnt matter what mother baord it will have its own drivers for itself.....thanks for the reply

with floppy disks, that's correct. they all should work if plugged in correctly. even 5.25inch disk drives seem to be supported still. reasonably modern bios systems will recognise CD-ROMs, and even boot from them if the boot parameters are setup correctly. older bios systems did not actually recognise CDROMS, but they could still be recognised on the IDE cable by the operating system. CDROMs may still need drivers to work with the operating system, but modern operating systems will recognise them and load the appropriate drivers. dos and win3.11 need drivers to use CDROMs, and the config.sys file needs to be set up correctly. there used to be non-IDE drives that were plugged into the soundcard not the IDE socket. these obviously need an appropriate soundcard (i think they were mainly from creative soundblaster). again win95 onwards have the drivers, although you need an IDE CDROM to load the drivers from the windows installation disk. drivers are available for the creative non-IDE CDROMs for win3.1 at their site. if you happen to be buying second hand, from quadspeed up, the creative CDROMs were IDE. for motherboards, it's not really a question of drivers. the motherboard is the computer - it doesn't need software to drive itself. cheers tacitus