The Floppy drive is always existing => Fixed in SVN/3.1.0

[MrX1980]

Host:
WinXP x64 SP2 english with no floppy drive and in VirtualBox deactivated.

Guest:

• Win2003 R2 x64 SP2 english
• WinXP x64 SP2 german

Windows show always that a floppy drive is present?!

[MrX1980]

Floppy Drive deactivated

[MrX1980]

Windows show a floppy drive

[Frank Mehnert]

The floppy can be disabled with

VBoxManage modifyvm VM_NAME -floppy disabled

[MrX1980]

Thanks that works, but the checkbox (VirtualBox_Error_002a.jpg) should set it to <FloppyDrive enabled="false" /> if it is unchecked.

And is it right that instead of a floppy drive my cardreader (drive F - I) is selectable as a floppy drive?

[Frank Mehnert]

The reason for not disabling the device is that this leaves the option to insert a floppy medium during runtime, even if that was not intended during VM creation. This floppy device in the guest should not hurt.

I'm not sure about your cardreader. These devices probably report themself as drives with a changeable medium.

[Charles]

If the physical hardware does not include a floppy drive then the reason Frank gives for the questionable design decision does not apply.

It is true that the unwanted, useless virtual floppy does not eat much, make a lot of noise or smell bad. It is only untidy and a cause for consternation (I had it listed as a low priority issue before stumbling accross this ticket).

It would be sweet if disabling the floppy meant it did not appear in the virtual machine. That's intuitively obvious, a good design goal!

[Frank Mehnert]

The virtual hardware has nothing to do with the physical hardware. Even if the host does not have a physical floppy then it might be useful to have a virtual floppy drive anyway. It is currently not possible to add virtual devices to a running VM or to a VM having snapshots. So better be able to insert a virtual floppy medium later (because the floppy device isn't disabled completely) than to not being able to use a floppy at all.

But anyway, we might add this setting to the GUI at some time.

[Frank Mehnert]

VBox 3.1.0 will allow to remove the floppy controller from the VM.