Member Avatar for Crazy_M

its never done this before, but when xp loads completely up after a reboot/start up all my statbar icons come up desk top fully loaded, suddenly my floppy drive kicks on.. then quits, never done this before, ive scanned for virus,....

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Following s description (floppy spins briefly after XP finishes loading) and s suggestion to look at what starts with Windows, here are focused checks that avoid re-running the things you already tried and will help isolate hardware vs software.

Physically inspect the drive first. Make sure no disk is stuck in the bay and press the eject to confirm the switch is not jammed. With the machine powered down, check the floppy ribbon and power connector for a loose or damaged cable and confirm the ribbon is on the correct connector. If a spare drive or ribbon is available, swap them to see whether the behavior follows the drive or stays with the machine. If the PC is old and the floppy is not needed, temporarily disable the floppy controller in the BIOS to see if the activity stops (power off before changing).

If hardware seems OK, trace what in Windows is touching the A: device. Use Process Monitor to capture accesses and filter for paths beginning with A:\ or for DeviceIoControl calls to the floppy driver; that will show the exact process issuing the I/O. Autoruns will reveal non-obvious scheduled tasks and services that are not shown by tray icons. Try booting into Safe Mode (or a Linux live CD) to determine whether the probe occurs outside of normal XP services. Also try uninstalling the floppy controller in Device Manager and rebooting to force Windows to re-detect the device.

If no process is found and the drive still spins even with the controller disabled, the drive or motherboard floppy controller may be failing; replacing the drive or leaving it disconnected is reasonable if the drive is unused. When opening the case, take normal ESD/warranty precautions. For the monitoring tools mentioned, see the official Sysinternals pages: Process Monitor and Autoruns.

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Member Avatar for DMR

Have you added any new software lately? It sounds like something loading in the background might be doing a quick disk scan.

Member Avatar for Crazy_M

i dont remember loading anything, since it has started, but i will try shutting down each start up icon, and find out.. .thanikz

Member Avatar for DMR

If that doesn't work, try emptying any program/system cache folders. I've run across instances where the fact that you recently accessed a file on a floppy gets "remembered" by a program or even by the OS, and because of that your floppy drive gets checked to see if the file is still available. I remember that I used to have occasions where I'd fired up Word and the "Please insert a disk into drive A:" dialog window poped up right as the program was finishing loading. It turned out to be caused by the fact that in those instances I had worked on a document that was stored on floppy, and that document was still listed in Word's cache of recently-used files.

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