Problem
My (internal) floppy drive does not work in Windows (neither XP nor 7). That is, when trying to access the A:
drive, nothing occurs, no light, no motor, nothing.
It does however work in DOS, in the BIOS boot-menu, in Windows setup (ie F6 to load drivers), etc.
Symptoms
From command-line:C:\>dir a:\
The device is not ready.
C:\>
From Explorer:
Please insert a disk into A-Floppy (A:).
(Yes, there is a disk in the drive, but that is irrelevant since Windows does not turn the drive on at all. Also, ejecting and putting a disk in the drive does make a sound like the pin falling into place, but that is more mechanical than electrical.)
Test
I tried removing the\DosDevices\A:
and all (four) entries that refer to \??\FDC#…
from HKLM\SYSTEM\MountedDevices
. Then I uninstalled the floppy drive and controller and rebooted. Windows detected the drive and installed drivers for it, then told me to format the floppy disk before I can use it, but never actually activated the drive. Clicking Format did nothing.
Search
Not surprisingly, most of the search results simply talk about setting the jumpers on the drive or enabling the drive in the BIOS, but these are all just about getting a drive to work at all, not only in a specific OS (though this page does discuss a floppy drive working in Windows and not in DOS—backwards! and not the first time either).Other Information
One thing of note is that I have a small flash-drive permanently plugged into a USB port on the back that I use to boot DOS without using a floppy or CD. In Windows the flash drive appears as a standard removable drive and is assigned toB:
, but I can’t imagine why that would cause the floppy drive to not work in Windows (especially when it does work in DOS). Of course when I boot from the flash-drive, the floppy drive is B:
and the flash-drive is A:
, but everything else works as normal.
\DosDevices\A:
fromHKLM\SYSTEM\MountedDevices
and will see if that helps when I reboot. I’m trying to figure out a way to list devices of the form\??\Volume{GUID}
to remove the other floppy entry fromMountedDevices
as well… (I didn’t note down the data field of the DosDevice first; oops).:-o
Maybe I’ll just have to delete them all and reassign all the letters.:-D