# Solved: USB floppy drive not found/recognized



## pikespeakbob (Jun 10, 2004)

For some reason my USB floppy drive is not found or recognized in Win 7 64 bit, it was working but not anymore. Can't find it in Computer Management-Disk Management but it is listed in Devices and shows no conflicts.


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## huggie54 (Feb 17, 2008)

hiya,have you plugged it into all the usb slots?.if so remove all usb devices,go to device manager,expand universal serial bus controllers,right-click on all the family usb host controllers and delete,reboot the machine letting windows reinstall automatically,then try the floppy drive


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## pikespeakbob (Jun 10, 2004)

My bad...I had forgotten to expand COMPUTER all the way, it was there but still has a problem. I can't open the floppy, keep getting the .."need to format...," drive A is unable to format and also unable to make a copy of the disk. This seems to be sort of a universal problem, however, this USB floppy drive fails on both my desktop and laptop but not on a friends laptop, I can open and see the photo files. We're both using Win 7 and again, this was working on my desktop only three months ago-go figure.


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## DoubleHelix (Dec 10, 2004)

Floppy drives are very mechanical, and since they're not common, they're rare and made poorly. It's possible the drive simply failed. The fact that it worked 3 months ago has nothing to do with today. 

I assume you tried multiple disks to confirm the problem isn't with the disk itself. If so, you'll need to buy a replacement. I would suggest you then immediately move all the data you need off floppy disks and stop using them. As far as I know, new disks aren't being made, so the drives won't be far behind.


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## managed (May 24, 2003)

I would copy the files off the floppies onto your friend's laptop asap.


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## pikespeakbob (Jun 10, 2004)

managed said:


> I would copy the files off the floppies onto your friend's laptop asap.


Update: As of today my external usb floppy drive does not work and cannot format floppies in both of my friends PC's as well as my own. We even tried the virtual XP program in his WIN 7 PC's and got the same error messages. We now suspect that there was a Microsoft security or optional download update that has caused this problem and after Googling this problem I see that quite a lot of people have the same problem with no found fix. I suppose that I could try system restore back to August, 2011 to see if the problem clears and if it does, would have to re-install one security update at a time in order to pin-point the culprit.


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## DoubleHelix (Dec 10, 2004)

You tried two different computers which confirms my suspicion that it's a hardware problem.


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## pikespeakbob (Jun 10, 2004)

DoubleHelix said:


> You tried two different computers which confirms my suspicion that it's a hardware problem.


I've also tried two different floppy drives, both fail on all computers.


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## DoubleHelix (Dec 10, 2004)

Troubleshooting is a process.

Take one drive and try it on two computers. Doesn't work on either? Try different disks. Same problem? Repeat both steps with a different drive.

It is *highly* unlikely to be anything related to Windows that would affect 2 computers in exactly the same obscure way. To be sure, take the drives and piles of various disks to another friend's house who has another type of computer running another operating system. Repeat the process.


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## pikespeakbob (Jun 10, 2004)

DoubleHelix said:


> Troubleshooting is a process.
> 
> Take one drive and try it on two computers. Doesn't work on either? Try different disks. Same problem? Repeat both steps with a different drive.
> 
> It is *highly* unlikely to be anything related to Windows that would affect 2 computers in exactly the same obscure way. To be sure, take the drives and piles of various disks to another friend's house who has another type of computer running another operating system. Repeat the process.


Problem update:

My original problem started about a month ago, this was after my external floppy drive was working and reading the disks with no problem. I have about 20 floppies that I was going to copy the pictures onto a DVD and I had tried one or two that worked, didn't try them all and didn't bother to copy at that time. Then, about four weeks ago I must have tried one or two different floppies that were bad (see attachment) and didn't realize my mistake at the time and thought they were all bad. Also attached is a .jpg of a good blank floppy. It turned out that only eight floppies were bad and the rest were good (should have checked them all in the first place and marked them as such).

I have since used the evaluation copy of BadCopy Pro to check the bad floppies for any recoverable files and data-no success, they all failed to recover anything. I did check the good floppies with the program and they found all the files.

The bottom line is that the eight bad floppies still get the error messages that they must be formatted and when trying to format, it won't allow and all the disk properties show that all the disk space is used-go figure. Don't know the reason as all the floppies (both good and bad) were stored together. I guess I'll go cry in my egg nog and kiss all my photos on the bad floppies bye-bye.

Thanks to all for the help and suggestions and will be closing this post as "solved?"


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