USB floppy drive appears and disappears

I came across some old floppy disks (3.5) and I wanted to see if there is anything I need off them before discarding. I have a USB floppy drive and I have two Dell Inspiron 17 5000 Series PC. When I plug the floppy into one of them it works fine, but when I plug it into the second one, I momentarily get an A drive in Windows explorer and then it disappears. I tried a different USB port and the same thing happens. Other USB drives such as my external hard drive work fine.

I googled and saw something about it possibly being a driver issue but it was unclear exactly where I should check the driver version.

A 3.5 floppy USB, never heard of one...lol,  What driver is associated with it in Device Manager on other other system under Properties ?  Copy the driver to the other or will have to figure out the driver and insert it while doing Add New Hardware.

A 3.5 floppy USB, never heard of one...lol,  What driver is associated with it in Device Manager on other other system under Properties ?  Copy the driver to the other or will have to figure out the driver and insert it while doing Add New Hardware.

https://www.amazon.com/3-5-floppy-drive-usb-external/s?k=3.5+floppy+drive+usb+external

@6sixty6six thanks. LOL. I had no idea they made a external. 

I thought they went the way of the Dodo Bird when the stopped making or should I say we stopped buying internal ones.

Heaven help the us and the ones that want to run code from them.

PS: As the trains, and rails, are technology from the early 1900's, I see little problem running them on technology from the 1970's

Other than hardware availability and media degredation over time, sure.  Also not sure which computer system they're running from the early 1900s.

Edited by pseymour, 14 April 2024 - 07:43 AM.

Okay maybe this might be the problem. When I look on the machine that works under Universal Serial Bus controller, everything seems to be the same except for 1 item;

Intel® 8 Series USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 - 9C26.

on the machine that works the driver provider is Intel and the version is 9.4.0.1025. On the machine that doesn't work, the driver provider is MS and the version is 10.0.19041.4170.

If I look at the driver details the three files are the same names;

usbehci.sys

usbhub.sys

usbport.sys

Can I simple copy the files from one machine to the other?

You might be able to right-click the device in Device Manager, choose Properties, click the Driver tab, and roll back the driver to a previous version.

You might be able to right-click the device in Device Manager, choose Properties, click the Driver tab, and roll back the driver to a previous version.

Or remove it in device mgr, restart, and Windows will detect it. See if that helps.