Possessed "A" Drive

Is your A: drive possessed? Does it mysteriously
start up at random times, even if there's no disk
inserted? Here's how to exorcise the demons.

There are numerous possible causes for the
waking A: drive. They all share one thing in
common. A program thinks something it needs
to run is on the floppy drive. This program could
be Windows itself.

The most likely culprit is your antivirus program.
Most antivirus programs scan the A: drive on
startup and exit, looking for boot-sector viruses.
The programs don't normally scan the drive once
the system is up and running, but they can if
autoscan is turned on. Disable the automatic
antivirus protection to see if that fixes the
problem.

Other programs may also be trying to access the
floppy for various reasons. For example, if you've
ever saved a file on floppy in Microsoft Word,
Word will try to access the floppy at seemingly
random intervals. Outlook also looks at the A:
drive for a variety of reasons. Take note of what
programs are running during the mysterious
accesses. If closing a program stops the problem,
try to figure out why the program wants the file.
It's often because a file on the A: drive is in the
most recently used file menu. Get rid of that
reference and your troubles will disappear.
If you use the Findfast disk indexer (which installs
automatically with Microsoft Office) make sure it's
not indexing the floppy. Open the Find Fast
control-panel and disable floppy indexing. You can
disable Find Fast entirely. It's a notorious
processor hog.

You should also clear the Run History, Documents
folder, and the like. If they contain references to
files on the A: drive, Windows will often check the
drive just for fun. Use the TweakUI control panel
to clear these folders. Click on the Paranoia tab
and check all the boxes in the Cover Your Tracks
section. If you don't have a copy of TweakUI, you
can download it here.

The fabulous Windows Annoyances site has a list
of other things you can try.

Mysterious floppy-drive accesses are very
common. They're harmless, but spooky too.
We hope some of these tips will help you track
down your problem.