I’m not sure if I can explain this clearly enough, but here goes:
I have Windows XP home running on a Dell Dimension with a 3.5 diskette drive as the A drive. I rarely use this, but every now and again… Anyway. I put a disk in, and it reads and writes fine. However once I take the disk out, it’s like the computer believes it’s still there, and makes this horrible grinding noise as it attempts over and over to read from it (at least, that’s my guess as to what’s happening) whenever I open or close Explorer, or when I shut the computer down, and some other starts/ends of programs can cause the grinding, too. This may go on for a day or so, until for some unknown reason it groks – oh, drive is empty? I’ll stop looking – and no more grinding.
Until the next time I need to use the A: drive.
Why does it do this? Is it supposed to do this? (None of my earlier computers ever did this.) Is letting it go on damaging anything other than my ears? How do I tell it the disk is gone? I mean, once it’s stopped writing and the little light goes off, I just take the disk out – Am I supposed to be doing something more?
I consulted my brother who knows a bit more about computers than me and he said it couldn’t be that the hardware didn’t know the disk wasn’t there, because if it couldn’t tell that, it wouldn’t be able to read or write from it. Which sounds reasonable, I guess.
He suggested it might be caused by my virus checker trying to hunt for viruses obsessively. I run Norton AntiVirus, and looked at the various options in the control window, but couldn’t see anything that seemed to translate into “leave the A: drive alone.”
So… any ideas what is wrong and what to do about it?
Well, my first thought too was your virus scanner…
Some things to try:
Clear out the My Recent Documents
(Right click task bar…properties…start menu tab…customize button…clear)
Go into the boot section in the bios and turn off floppy drive seek at boot.
Oh…and when it seeks for the floppy, perhaps try shoving a floppy in the drive and seeing if it shuts it up.
Clean out your temp files.
Oh, sorry…I forgot to add:
Open Norton Antivirus
Go to Auto protect.
Then Click advanced.
Uncheck scan all removable media for boot viruses every time it is mounted.
And then uncheck floppy disk in A for boot viruses when shutting down.
Obviously, some program is trying to access the floppy. Download and run Hijack This!, create a log file and then copy and paste the log into the box here. It should inform you if there’s something nasty in your computer.
I know everyone’s suggesting a virus, which it could be I suppose. But this doesn’t explain why it only does it after you use the floppy drive. And anyways, a virus spreading by floppy? What is this? 1988??
My guess is it’s more likely to be some kind of third party caching or indexing or backup application you maybe don’t realize you have running. This application doesn’t realise, for some reason, that the A: drive is removable media, so when you access it , it adds the A: drive to its list of things to cache/index/backup. You remove the floppy, but it keeps going back to give it a try.
But Daizy’s suggestion about your recent docs is a good one too. That might explain why it eventually stops. The document on the A: drive drops off the recent list; the A: drive stops being accessed.
Either way, something’s up. Your computer should understand that your A: drive is not a permanent feature
I agree with Futile Gesture (many programs squeal at me because they can’t find ‘C:’…to which I say keep looking…no names, except for the word ‘real’ )
Many apps, including Explorer, remember where they last looked. If you look at A: from almost any app and then quit, that’s where you are next time you start that program. Instead of just popping out the floppy and shutting down a program, switch to C: first. That way C: is the active drive, and A: is irrelevant.
(It’s still a good idea to check for the bad stuff mentioned above.)
The same thing happens to me (Dell with XP). The same thing happened with my previous PC (not XP). I never bothered to research it, but the virus-checking seems like a logical possibility.
On the other hand, just now I went to “My Computer” and doubleclicked the A drive (which was empty), and I got that grinding noise, which didn’t stop until I closed My Computer. I would think the OS should know that the A drive was empty.
No, it doesn’t. PC floppy controllers don’t heed the DISKCHANGE signal from the floppy drive. That means the OS has no way to know without accessing the drive. AmigaOS had a routine that constantly checked the status of the drive. It generated an annoying 1/3-1/4 Hz click that was particularly annoying with some drives. PCs stay quiet until you attempt to access the contents of the drive. In this day and age, most attempts are inadvertent.
BTW, the noise the drive makes when exercizing the heads back and forth is called “gronking”.
We have this problem at work, and it is caused by Symantec Antivirus, which took over Norton. Our work-around is to go into the BIOS at startup, and make sure the A: drive is not listed as the primary boot disk, i.e. make the C: drive the primary boot location, and the problem goes away.
I did the clear out the documents AND followed these directions to tame Norton, and then tried to make it grind: I read files on a floppy, exited explorer with the ‘focus’ on the A: drive, wrote to it with both Explorer and from a word processor, shoved disks in and out and started and stopped the programs that usually caused the grinding == not a sound!
I even did that double click on a: drive in my computer with the drive empty: it just told me to insert a disk into the a: drive after a single click.
Let’s see, I did all this AFTER writing to the floppy, so the ‘recent doc’ file would no longer be empty, yes? So it sounds like NAV was the culprit.
Thank you, Daizy!
Thank you also to everyone else. I’m saving these answers and if the grinding, excuse me, gronking resumes, I’ll try the other suggestions.
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