Every now and then, for no apparant reason, my A: drive (standard 3.5 floppy drive) tries to access the floppy disk in the drive. Of course, there is never a floppy disk in the drive when this happens.
Even when I’m not using any programs, and the screensaver is running, I’ll occassionally hear the annoying sound. I’ve begun to wonder if my floppy drive is possessed by Satan. Or Bill Gates (assuming the two are mutually exclusive …).
I’ve run Norton Antivirus, which didn’t find any viruses.
I’ve shut down every damned program I can, but that doesn’t prevent it.
It happens when I am offline and when I am online.
Does anyone know what might be causing this seemingly-random attempted access of my floppy?
Mine’s done this since I installed a new hard drive a few weeks ago. I just put a dummy disk in the drive so it doesn’t get into an endless ‘searching for disk’ loop and roll along. Thank you for bringing it up…now maybe I’ll find out what’s wrong with mine, too.
Humm… it could be a trojan (someone trying to snoop around on your computer from another computer). Try scanning your computer with another anti-virus program. From past experience, I’ve found no single AV program will catch every single virus that pops up… Try using AVP at http://www.avp.com.
Don’t panic yet. MS Word will do that sometimes on one of my home PCs while I have a document open. I have no idea why, but it only starts happening after I start Word for the first time, and does not stop until I reboot.
Thanks for the link, Obvious Guy. A paranoid fella like me can’t have enough anti-virus utilities.
As for MS word, I too notice that it accesses the drive sometimes. I’ve always assumed this is Word automatically saving a back-up file in case of problems.
However, I almost never use Word. Notepad and Wordpad are nearly always enough for me.
