Windows 11 No Longer Uses Floppy Drive A in Device Manager

Windows 11's Device Manager ushered in a new change that solves a problem that solves a problem that may have plagued you for years.

Generally, Windows users can manually select drivers for their hardware in Device Manager and have the freedom to choose the path to the driver. When updating drivers in Device Manager, if you choose to manually search and install from disk (Have Disk), the default path used to be A:\, but now it finally changes to the system disk letter (usually C:\). At the same time, the icon on the settings page has been changed from representing floppy drives and diskettes to a modern hard disk.

Device Manager is the default program for managing or troubleshooting the hardware and drivers on your PC. Previously, Microsoft set the default driver path for Windows Device Manager to A:\, the previously common root path for floppy disks. If your computer comes with a floppy drive, inserting a floppy disk will assign it as drive A. The retention of this setting also indicates to some extent that the compatibility of Windows 11 has not been reduced, as shown in a video posted by Jrcraft on YouTube, Windows 11 can correctly recognize 5.25-inch floppy disks and can read their contents just like on Windows XP.

By 2022, however, floppy disks will have almost disappeared from our daily lives, and this A:\ default drive letter will be meaningless for more users who use hard drives. So Microsoft changed this path to C:\ in Windows 11 Build 22000 (stable version).

This change makes sense, and it does come a little late.