Why is my Sony USB Floppy (A:) drive merged into my Samsung SSD?

JamesAndersonJr · 29 Jul 2020

Ztruker said:

@JamesAndersonJr, how often do you use the floppy. Seems like a reasonable solution is to leave it disconnected until you need it.

A: Almost daily, until I get the files transferred over to DVD or Blu-Ray. Good idea but increases wear and tear on the connection port.

Ztruker said:

You could also report it to Samsung but I don't think it would be very high on their todo list, unless it's a simple fix.

I have on Twitter @SamsungSupport, Facebook @SamsungSSD, etc. Tell me about it.

Ztruker · 01 Aug 2020

What about copying them from floppy to a folder on your hard drive. Continue as aggressively as possible until they are all done then remove it. Then you can copy them to DVD or Blu-ray.

How many floppy's are you talking about? Seems like omitting the DVD/Blu-ray for now until you have all the floppy's processed would save a lot of time.

What kind of error rates are you getting? Floppys are notorious for losing data due to errors.

Berton · 01 Aug 2020

One thing folks have run into with floppies is they need to be formatted. The issue goes back a few versions where Windows does something to the disks, the cure was to first write-protect them before inserting into the drive. I've found that the best way to assure getting data off. I have a computer with a 3.5" floppy drive plus a couple of USB floppy drives for portability [also a 250MB ZIP drive].

JamesAndersonJr · 06 Nov 2020

I'm going to resurrect this thread because this issue still hasn't been solved, and I think I have a hunch where the problem may lie: The partition system being GPT instead of MBR.

Berton · 06 Nov 2020

Could it be a setting in Settings, System, Storage causing the issue? I've not seen the type of partitioning and formatting of a drive affect other drives in/attached to the same computer.

JamesAndersonJr · 07 Nov 2020

I say that because of these (2) other clues:

The problem only effects the first internal physical drive. If you have other physical SSD's in the system it does not effect them at all.
Windows is evidently trying to create a logical partition (or some other type of "quasi-partition") in the front of all other partitions on only the first physical drive.

I believe this may not effect most users with USB Floppies, because with a MBR on the drive this manipulation works fine as the programmers at Microsoft intended, but with GPT in use on the first drive this manipulation causes issues.

Now, keep in mind my assumptions are purely speculative, and only what I've concluded from the pieces of evidence I've gathered.

Berton · 07 Nov 2020

A couple of things to wonder about, one is whether the computer is "too new" to have BIOS support for on-board/installed floppy drives, for drive A and B or only drive A and the other is whether the boot process/choices include USB Floppy Drives. As technology marches on there are things being left behind. Seems to me Win10 is better than previous versions in attempting to make use of storage devices.

JamesAndersonJr · 08 Nov 2020

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Berton said:

A couple of things to wonder about, one is whether the computer is "too new" to have BIOS support for on-board/installed floppy drives, for drive A and B or only drive A and the other is whether the boot process/choices include USB Floppy Drives. As technology marches on there are things being left behind. Seems to me Win10 is better than previous versions in attempting to make use of storage devices.

*giggles* Here are the relevant specs of the 8 year old dinosaur in question (though the same behavior has also manifested itself with my 8th Gen Core i7 8550U Dell Inspiron 15 5570 laptop):

Motherboard: P8Z77-V LE PLUS
CPU: Intel Core i7 3770 (vanilla, non-k variant) 3.4 GHz
Storage: Samsung 860 EVO SATA III 4 TB (Partition C: = Exactly 2 TB | Partition D: = ~1.18 TB | Samsung Overprovisioning: remaining 10%)
Memory: 32GB - 4 x 8GB Kingston HyperX Fury CL10 DDR3 1600 MHz DIMM Blue
Floppy Drive: TEAC Corp. Sony USB Floppy Model No. FD-05PUB

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JamesAndersonJr said:

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Floppy Drive: TEAC Corp. Sony USB Floppy Model No. FD-05PUB

Is this perhaps not a real "Sony" Floppy Disk Drive? Because the only place I saw mention of "Sony" is in "Device Manager". Hmmm... maybe I need a specific TEAC Corp. FD-05PUB driver.

Berton · 08 Nov 2020

JamesAndersonJr said:

Is this perhaps not a real "Sony" Floppy Disk Drive? Because the only place I saw mention of "Sony" is in "Device Manager". Hmmm... maybe I need a specific TEAC Corp. FD-05PUB driver.

I have a Dell-branded USB floppy drive that identifies in Win10's Device Manager as TEAC FD-05PUB, same as yours, haven't installed any specific drivers. TEAC has been around quite awhile.