I was doing some clean up in my computer room and low and behold I find several 1.44MB 3.5 in floppy disks with various labels indicating they have pictures and document files I may still need.

Unfortunately all my computers do not have a floppy drive.

Luckily I found a Samsung USB Floppy Disk Drive (FDD).  Specifically it has the model number SFD-321U/HP.  I plugged it into a USB port on my Windows 7 computer and it would not recognize the device.  After a few days of searching the web, I found the right driver at usb-drivers.org–SamsungSFD-321UUSB4Floppy.zip [http://goo.gl/1HYH3L].  I unzipped and updated my device driver.

Anyway, to use it, simply unzip it and remember where you unzipped it.

Next, open the device manager in Windows 7 (at Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\System) and find the device entry that has the exclamation mark on it and right click it.  Select “Update Driver Software” from the menu that pops up.  Then click “Browse my computer for driver software.”  When you do, make sure to select the folder where you unzipped the driver you downloaded.  It should have the name “SamsungSFD-321UUSB4Floppy” if you didn’t change the unzip destination folder.  From there, click the Next button and follow the prompts from there until the driver is installed.

Once the driver is installed, Windows 7 will begin to recognize the floppy drive as Floppy drive A:.

I now have a floppy disk drive A.  I feel like I’m back in the late 80’s.