I tried everything above, and it didn't seem to work. However, I did notice that when I checked the PATH environment variable on the command line, something was adding my floppy drive to the path. It wasn't in my Advanced settings in the System control panel. But I did see it when I ran CMD.EXE and typed "set" to see all the environment variables.

However, after doing some searching around, I found that my partition with Win98 bootfiles had an autoexec.bat file there. And that is what was adding a:\ to my path! Once I commented it out the set path line, my floppy grinding went away.

So, for some reason, WinXP was executing that autoexec.bat file that wasn't sitting on the system partition(!), which added a:\ to my path, and caused all the grinding noise whenever I ran a program.

So, if none of the above solutions work, check your PATH environment variable on the command line to see if your floppy drive is on it. If it is, it could be an autoexec.bat file sitting somewhere....

Responses to this message: re: My own solution to 'Stop Windows from Randomly Searching the Floppy Drive' (felix: Saturday, March 26, 2005 at 8:09 pm) re: My own solution to 'Stop Windows from Randomly Searching the Floppy Drive' (imran: Wednesday, August 10, 2005 at 8:36 am)

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