Hard Drive, Floppy

How do you get to the Hard Drive on a PC? Where does the Floppy Disk show up?

If you've used a Macintosh, you're used to the icon of the Hard Drive in the upper right of the desktop and, when you insert a floppy disk or Zip or CD-ROM or other removable device then you get the icon of the disk on the desktop of the Mac.

That's not how Windows works.

In the land of Windows, you get to a disk by opening the icon named My Computer. All the drives are within that icon. It looks like this:

Opening this icon yields a windows something like this:

Notice that no matter what the name of the drive (as in "Pc disk" above) each drive has a letter associated with it. In the screenshot above this PC has A, C, D, E and S drives.

On almost all PCs, the A drive is the floppy disk drive. The C drive is the main hard drive, the D or E drive is the CD-ROM. Other drives might be additional hard drives, CD or DVD player, Zip, Jazz or other removable drives or network drives.

Activity 1: Getting to your Drives

1) Get to the desktop.

2) Double-click on My Computer to open the My Computer window.

You may open any of the drives you like to explore them. Here is a window of what my C drive looks like. Yours will vary.

More about floppy disks

When you insert a floppy disk onto a Mac, you get the icon of the floppy drive on the desktop. To get to a floppy disk (or other volume) on a Windows PC you need to go into My Computer and open it after you've inserted it.

If you try and open the floppy disk without having a disk in the disk drive, you'll get an error dialog box that looks like this:

You'll get this if you ever try and open a disk drive that doesn't have a disk in it.

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