Unable to remove the floppy device

I was wondering why every one of my VMs had a Floppy Disk Drive that I never used! Every time I tried to remove the floppy drive object from the Virtual Machine configuration, the floppy drive would continue to appear in the guest operating system. Not knowing why the ‘phantom’ object continued to appear, I searched the internet tirelessly until I came across this post from VMware. If you ever have a hard time removing a floppy drive from a VM, try the instructions from VMware below.

Unable to remove the floppy device in the Windows virtual machine (1034616)

Symptoms

After removing the floppy drive from the hardware of the virtual machine, the list of drives in the guest machine continues to list the floppy drive
When you disable the floppy and reboot the virtual machine, it appears again

Resolution

This issue occurs when the standard floppy drive is enabled in the BIOS settings of the virtual machine.
To resolve this issue, you must disable the floppy drive in the guest machine.
To disable the floppy drive in the guest machine:

Power off the virtual machine.
Right-click the virtual machine and click Edit Settings.
Click the Option Tab.
Click Boot Options under Advanced.
Select the The next time the virtual machine boots, force entry into the BIOS setup screen option.
Power on the virtual machine.
Using arrow keys, disable Legacy Diskette A:.

Press F10 to save the changes and exit. The machine reboots and completes the configuration.

via VMware KB: Unable to remove the floppy device in the Windows virtual machine.

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About the Author

Nizam Mohamed

Nizam Mohamed is a technical architect, specialising in cloud solutions, virtualization and end-user computing. Other technology interests include Enterprise Technologies, Cybersecurity and Enterprise Desktop Management.

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