Get rid of A:\ "the invisible floppy drive"

[Guest Jlo555]

So my laptop is new enough that it did not come with a built in floppy drive, but it did have 98SE drivers, so I went and installed 98SE on it (of course), and My Computer reports that there is still a A:\ 3.5" floppy drive, which is physically non-existent. If I click on the icon, the system freezes and eventually blue screens. If I disable it in Device Manager, it disappears from My Computer, but is constantly reported as "disabled" in Device Manager. Is there a way to permanently get rid of this "reported" drive and to stop 98SE from believing it exists? (Right now I'm working under XP Pro, but I will return to 98SE in the near future, and would like to fix this issue among other things).

[ldb]

disable it in BIOS both presence and floppy seek. OR Use TweakUI to remove the drive from showing up in My Computer. Remove the floppy disk controller in safe mode from device manager.

[Chozo4]

I have this issue as well on my laptop. No way to remove the drive and there is no floppy controller on my laptop. Disabling the 'detected' controller in windows did nothing in this respect as well. I've found using a tool called 'DLMANIP' to remove it during startup does the trick. Insert it in your autoexec. bat file to remove it prior to boot.

Usage in autoexec.bat would be:

dlmanip delete A

DLMANIP Project page: http://sta.c64.org/dlmanip.html

Edited April 2, 2008 by Chozo4

[celtish]

I prefer to have the conventional built-in floppy drive. Sometimes it can save your bacon.

[Chozo4]

I prefer to have the conventional built-in floppy drive. Sometimes it can save your bacon.

Of course, one wouldn't remove a floppy drive for the sake of just removing it if it REALLY exists (that would be pure silliness!). The case here is where windows adds an entry for 'drive A' as if there actually was such a drive but never was. Hence the removal of the drive letter of an 'invisible' floppy.

Happens with some mainboards and/or BIOS' which don't give the option to disable the controller. Even though the floppy controller doesn't even physically exist on the system or is disabled, windows continues to detect it's 'existance' and assign a drive letter.

Edited April 2, 2008 by Chozo4

[dencorso]

Outstanding, Chozo4!

But the link you gave is dead already, so here's my two cents:

DLMANIP Project page (link). This one is at the Internet Archive, which saves the page but usually not the binaries, so don't download from there or you'll just get a corrupt zip). For download use this link instead.

Below are two more links, which can be of interest:

Letter Assigner (link), perhaps an alternative solution to the problem and...

the MSKB WHDC page on the subject (link), which enlightens but (as in so many other occasions) does not give any usable solution to the problem for normal users, despite being entitled, rather pompously: "Eliminating Phantom Floppy Disk Drives under Windows 95/98/Me"!

[shelby]

i think the delete of the floppy disk controller in the device manager should work. Anyway this work for me

[JaKSLaP]

You need to disable in the system BIOS

[shelby]

TweakUI works also and it is a very good program

Edited January 5, 2023 by shelby

[awkduck]

You can disable it in device manager. Then search the registry for the device name, as shown in device manager. Delete only the string value with the "name" of the device. Leave the other entries alone. If you delete the whole device, from the registry, the drive will just show up again on reboot.

[shelby]

15 hours ago, awkduck said:

You can disable it in device manager. Then search the registry for the device name, as shown in device manager. Delete only the string value with the "name" of the device. Leave the other entries alone. If you delete the whole device, from the registry, the drive will just show up again on reboot.

If it is in the device manager. Anyway TweakUI do the same job if you have or not floppy

Edited January 6, 2023 by shelby

[awkduck]

2 hours ago, shelby said:

If it is in the device manager. Anyway TweakUI do the same job if you have or not floppy

That is true. And disabling the controller in bios isn't always an option. I've had a thinclient that had floppy support in the S.O.C. but no pinout on the board. The bios page was very basic. But at least the controller was listed in Device Manager.

Glad you found a fix. Tweak UI is an option in most Win9x unofficial service packs. I myself, don't care for it. It seemed not to correctly undo some of it's own settings. And sometimes it would try to change something that had already been changed, by me or another program. The result also caused issues reverting the change.

Until I learned how to remove "Network Neighborhood" from the Desktop without it, that ended up being all I trusting it for.