the return of the floppy

[bloodnok]

an imac hasn't a floppy drive. most modern windows laptops haven't a floppy drive. why does my windows xp guest have a floppy drive? worse, why does it recreate the damned thing after i've moved it with device manager? next reboot, windows has discovered new hardware & the floppy is back. what? where is this floppy drive it keeps finding? how do i get rid of it permanently? (reason i want it gone is i accidentally clicked on it which threw a nasty error - shouldn't be there at all let alone throwing nasty errors ...)

[rcardona2k]

The floppy is an artifact of the machine BIOS which sends the inventory of devices to a virtual machine. You could try booting into the BIOS and disabling the floppy drive, then deleting the floppy from the device manager. There are no guarantees since Windows has a long heritage of having a floppy drive.

[bloodnok]

my host os is an imac. it has no bios - efi does the job - & definitely no floppy. is there a virtual bios you're referring to & if so how does one access it? vmware's help docs are a tad coy on the subject ...

[rcardona2k]

There is a virtual machine BIOS. The instructions to enter it flash very quickly at the VMware logo: "Press F2 to enter the BIOS". The challenge is a) the VM has to have focus to register F2 b) Mac keyboards usually require you to hold the fn key down to register F2, e.g. this requires pressing fn-F2. So in the instant the VMware logo flashes if you click in the window and trigger fn-F2 you will enter the virtual machine BIOS. The floppy option is right on the first screen "Legacy Diskette A:", set it to disabled.

If you need more time to enter the BIOS you can change the boot delay in the virtual machine configuration by reading the details in

[bloodnok]

perfect! thanks for the help!

[WoodyZ]

shouldn't be there at all let alone throwing nasty errors ...)

While you may think you not need the Floppy it is used by Fusion when setting up Windows using Windows Easy Install. Also if one finds the need for booting an XP Virtual Machine via the Windows Setup CD-ROM in order to use the Recovery Console and if the Virtual Machine virtual hard disk is SCSI then one will need the Floppy to load SCSI Drivers form a virtual floppy that can be downloaded from vmware.com. Windows NT and 2000 can use a Floppy for various System Level Tasks and some Linux distributions still uses a Floppy for System for Rescue Disks, etc.

Anyway it can be turned off/on in the Virtual Machine's BIOS as needed. :smileyhappy:

BTW "Please insert a disk into drive A:." hardly qualifies as "throwing nasty errors".