Solved Windows 11 unable to detect external floppy drive reader

My happiness short lived. As i discovered that the first floppy will show the file contents - any file contents from subsequent floppies will not be shown; instead the first floppies files will still be displayed

Try refreshing the view when you insert a new floppy. That's a fairly common issue.

Are you sure the drive or disks aren't faulty? I've not touched floppy discs in ages, but I do still have a Zip Drive and Windows sees it and reads the disks...





Point? Windows should have no issues seeing any type of drives. Now if the media associated with said drive is damaged or corrupt, well....

Don't currently have the device attached (I don't need or use it) but I can try and find it an check again. The last time I tried it it worked. No doubt it still does. As said, Windows still see any drives attached to it... unless the drive is bad (or disk media).

I have an ancient USB floppy, I dug it out and tested it, and it connected and reads/writes just fine. I also found my USB DVD-R/W, and it also appears to function. They actually might be useful one of these days, so I'm keeping them handy.

gunrunnerjohn said:

Just curious, what's the difference in the five different models on that page? There's no description and they're all the same price.

Click to expand...

They are basically all the same probably using the TEAC FD-05PUB drive, I think TEAC are the last manufacturer of such mechanisms.

Windows 11 is OK with mine, Dynamode branded.

The problem is with the floppy discs, they do not age well, my last remaining ones are 20+ years old and ~50% or more are not readable/partially readable anymore.
Refreshing the drive, re-inserting discs are par for the course to try and read old discs.

Historically the sfloppy.sys driver was going to be removed in Windows 10, but they got so many complaints it was restored and is still in Windows 11.

View attachment 140226

I stuck a floppy into mine and it was readable, and I then formatted it and wrote a few files to it. All seemed well.

The one oddity I see is when I disconnect it and try to reconnect it, it doesn't work until I reboot. Not a fatal flaw as I don't intended to be using this much, as long as it works the first time, I'm good.

My USB DVD-RW from the same time period behaves normally and has no problem disconnecting and reconnecting. I haven't needed that for a number of years either, I just found both of these in a major reorganization of my computer junk.

I happened upon this solution on my Windows 11 Dell Latitude 7480 with a 1.44 MB floppy connected to USB from a SmartDisk FDUSB-TM2 drive:
Settings
Bluetooth & devices
Devices
More devices and printer settings
Mitsumi USB FDD
(Right-click on Mitsumi USB FDD)
Browse files
Floppy Disk Drive (A:)
The files and folders in Drive A: now appear in a Windows Explorer-like window though without the drive being listed in the left-hand column.