… but I do have plenty of storage in Drives A & B. Unfortunately, even if I ask the update to go to either of those drives, I still get the “disk is full” message. Is there a way around this, because I really need to be able to update my GTX-1660 Super graphics card.
Thanks
A and B are terrible drive letters to use. Despite the fact that floppy drives haven’t had a physical connector available since PCIe hit the mainstream, there’s still software which will either encounter errors or outright refuse to operate when you try to use one of the letters which they would historically be assigned.
Short term, tell the installer to unpack to a USB flash drive. Long term, you should probably look into re-assigning the letters of those extra drives - or at least assigning them a second, more compatible letter.
Pretty sure you can buy SATA 3.5 floppy drives but hardly anyone does and it’s kinda pointless.
I have a USB drive for that and I barely use it for the old disks I still own.
I agree with this though:
Those had, traditionally, been assigned to your floppy (and later CD) drives and most older tech-heads like myself still assign new drives starting with C: for your main drive and beyond (I think my current computer is in the J: or K: range right now).
OP, you may want to look into using a few tools to clean up your drive. There are plenty of temp files that build up that can be safely deleted and there are programs (one of my favs id CCleaner) to identify and eliminate these files.
Also, consider uninstalling your current graphics driver and installing the fresh one as if it were brand new. I would do this after your done your drive cleanup and only if after doing that you are still getting the same error message about storage space.
You also may want to look into buying a backup drive and moving any non-essential files (like pictures or videos) to that backup. This will help conserve some space on your main drives as well.
Good luck.
Sure. I believe they’re even one of the oldest USB devices you could get, mostly because Apple retired the drive long before they made their OS incompatible with the software.
Not quite the same as the old ribbon connector on the motherboard, though.
Optical drives typically started at D - even the ones which required dedicated controller cards prior to more general IDE compatibility. It likely wasn’t strictly necessary given their driver was loaded long after BIOS had relinquished control to the OS but it would have been good practice at the time given floppy drives were still a thing.
IDE ones likely didn’t get a choice, given they had to obey the same master/slave, primary/secondary pre-configuration as hard drives.
Back when we were still installing drivers to make a CD drive run, most people I knew were installing a floppy drive on A: and a CD on B: This was after we had also given up on the ancient format of 5.25 floppy as well.
Later when it became part of the automatic installation process, the auto-assigned drive letter became D: as standard.
Thanks to all of you. I appreciate the info about the A&B drives. I didn’t know that, and this machine only plays cd/dvd’s anyway.
I used Ccleaner just yesterday and the C drive is still in the red. I have an external HD made by WD ELements(2621), but I haven’t worked with it too much and just plug it in every two weeks. It came with no instructions, so I am not sure if it’s even picking up. It does show under Bluetooth and other devices, however, and the G drive has all my media player cd’s on it.
The idea of uninstalling my present graphics card and re-installing the update as if it were new sounds like a good plan.
Tnanks
I hadn’t even thought of SATA floppy drives as something that could exist, but it’s pretty funny to think about. I don’t think a floppy drive could manage to saturate even IDE, let alone modern SATA 6Gbp/s haha. It kinda makes sense though because I don’t think motherboards have shipped with floppy connectors for over a decade at this point, so for someone who needs an internal floppy drive it’d either be SATA or an internal USB header (though in the case of the latter, I’d hope the drive faceplate has a couple of USB ports built in at least).
Fun fact, modern macOS still supports USB floppy drives and even recently updated its floppy disk icons to be more modern and high resolution. Kinda funny to imagine plugging a late-90s USB floppy drive with translucent fruit colored plastic into a sleek new M-series MacBook.
Truthfully they probably don’t make them anymore, but I recall a short time seeing them on places like Newegg.
Now they just make external USB floppy drives for those of us that still have floppy disks around.
sounds like the OS drive is full… try deleting stuff like the downloaded files for the previous driver update