Every application tries to read from the floppy drive (A:\)

  • Thread starter Thread starter fede.caceres
  • Start date Start date
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fede.caceres

Recently I did a silly thing, I needed to run Avira's NTFS4DOS
program, unfortunately, I had problems running the FreeDOS bootdisk,
so I created a Win ME DOS bootdisk and used it.

(I don't know if the part I mentioned before had anything to do with
what is happening now, I just think it's good for you all to know).
Once I logged back into windows, I got an error from Explorer.exe
saying that it couldn't read from the floppy drive (obviosly, I
removed the floppy from the drive before windows booted).
And I got a similar error when loading other applications, all of the
wanted to read from the floppy drive.

I spent the last couple of hours reading about this problem, and I
can't seem to find a solution. I scanned the whole drive (performing
Panda's online scan right now), removed temporary files, checked
for .PIF files, etc.

So i decided to download Sysinternal's File Monitor (filemon.exe). And
after that I ran MS Word, and filemon reported this:
02:41:09 a.m. explorer.exe:524 OPEN A:\wshESZ.DLL NOT FOUND Options:
Open Access: Read-Attributes
and after a while, it reported this:
02:41:28 a.m. WINWORD.EXE:4000 OPEN A:\"C:
\ARCHIV~1\MSNMES~1\msgsc.dll" NAME INVALID Options: Open Access: Read-
Attributes
02:41:29 a.m. WINWORD.EXE:4000 OPEN A:\"C:
\ARCHIV~1\MSNMES~1\msgsc.dll" NAME INVALID Options: Open Access: Read-
Attributes

So I'm puzzled, my intuition tells me that somehow the OS is somehow
appending the string "A:\" before every open command, thus generating
this error... but... why?

I'll experiment a little bit more with filemon.exe and report whatever
I find out.

I would really appreciate any comments or ideas on what might be
happening,
Thank you!

Federico Cáceres.
 
Heh...
Fixed it... after finding nothing in the virus scan, I remembered
about the environment variable "path".
So I went to My PC > Properties > Advanced > Env. Variables...
But I didn't find anything that pointed to A:\...

Finally, I decided to take a look at autoexec.bat, voila!
For some ODD reason, the WinME autoexec.bat file was saved into the
autoexec.bat file located at c:\...

Replaced it with an empty autoexec.bat file (they way it should be),
rebooted, and no mo errors!

I'm a happy person now.
Hope that this is useful for... anyone who finds himself/herself in
the same situation.

Bye!
 

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