Editing Floppy disk (section)

====Insertion and ejection====
After a disk is inserted, a catch or lever at the front of the drive is manually lowered to prevent the disk from accidentally emerging, engage the spindle clamping hub, and in two-sided drives, engage the second read/write head with the media.{{fact|date=June 2024}}

In some 5¼-inch drives, insertion of the disk compresses and locks an ejection spring which partially ejects the disk upon opening the catch or lever. This enables a smaller concave area for the thumb and fingers to grasp the disk during removal.{{fact|date=June 2024}}

Newer 5¼-inch drives and all 3½-inch drives automatically engage the spindle and heads when a disk is inserted, doing the opposite with the press of the eject button.{{fact|date=June 2024}}

On Apple [[Mac (computer)|Macintosh]] computers with built-in 3½-inch disk drives, the ejection button is replaced by software controlling an ejection motor which only does so when the operating system no longer needs to access the drive. The user could drag the image of the floppy drive to the trash can on the desktop to eject the disk. In the case of a power failure or drive malfunction, a loaded disk can be removed manually by inserting a straightened [[paper clip]] into a small hole at the drive's front panel, just as one would do with a [[CD-ROM]] drive in a similar situation. The [[X68000]] has soft-eject 5¼-inch drives. Some late-generation [[IBM PS/2]] machines had soft-eject 3½-inch disk drives as well for which some issues of [[DOS]] (i.e. [[PC DOS 5.02]] and higher) offered an [[EJECT (DOS command)|EJECT]] command.{{fact|date=June 2024}}