Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of Matt Kendall
Matt KendallFlag for United States of America

asked on

Floppy drive no longer works in Windows 10. How can I fix "Location is not available" error?

Hi,

I have a Windows 10 Dell Optiplex 790 that originally had Windows 7 on it.  We use a USB floppy drive on it which worked fine before the Windows 10 upgrade.  Now, the floppy drive comes up with a "Location is not available" error.  "The disk media is not recognized.  It may not be formatted."  It says this for all disks--even ones that work on another Windows 10 computer that has the same USB floppy drive.  Both computers are Dell and one--the floppy drive works.   This one--the floppy drive has those errors.  I've tried removing the driver and having it reinstall--then restarting.  It still does not work.  Do you have any recommendations or things I can try to make it work?  Oh, and one more thing.  I looked in Disk Manager and it doesn't even show up in disk manager but I do see an "A:" drive in File Explorer.  Thanks in advance for your help!
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of John
John
Flag of Canada image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Avatar of Matt Kendall

ASKER

Thanks John.  That reminded me that I should try to run a sfc /scannow and it came up with "Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files but was unable to fix some of them."  So it looks like the Windows 10 installation is probably corrupt and causing some problems.  When I do this installation using the USB key, it will just run a repair, correct?  So not everything will need to be reinstalled--it will just repair Windows.  I'll give it a try tomorrow and we'll see what happens.  Thanks again for your wise advice!
Avatar of nobus
you can also test if it happens on all USB ports
Thanks John.  It turned out to be a mix of two bad floppy drives and a large batch of bad 3.5" floppy disks.  I was able to get them to use usb flash drives instead of floppies as their old machine could read 1 GB usb drives too.  Thanks again John!
Thank your for the update and you are very welcome.