That old floppy drive bug?

[Guest]

I haven't done a full scan since I installed the new non-beta version of
Defender, but I did so yesterday - and discovered that the old floppy drive
bug is still with us! (You know what I mean?: the continuous repeated
activation of the floppy drive towards the end of a full scan.)

It seems odd that something so well-reported hasn't been fixed. Am I the
only person encountering it?

 

[Guest]

Hi Alan

I`m running a notebook with a USB floppy and experience the same problem.
So, you are not alone.

Stu

 

[Guest]

Back when I experienced this on Windows 2000 I never really thought it
through, I'll bet there's really nothing wrong here at all.

If you request a 'Full Scan' you are asking Defedner to perform a scan of
all disks currently in any drive. This would include not only hard drives,
but also any floppy or CD/DVD disks in those drives too. Since most PC BIOS
don't track the status of these drives, they will attempt to access them when
a request is made even if there isn't a disk in the drive.

To test this, you might try creating a custom scan for all hard drives, but
not including the floppy drive. If the floppy is still accessed it's
something else, possibly a real bug.

The other reason we've probably heard little about this is both that most
probably never perform a full scan and also many computers produced in the
last couple years don't even have a floppy, so this wouldn't even occur on
those.

Since I'm running OneCare on Vista (Defender is integrated) and can't run
Defender on W2K, I can't test any of this myself. So have at it guys!

Bitman

 

[Guest]

If you request a 'Full Scan' you are asking Defedner to perform a scan of
all disks currently in any drive. This would include not only hard drives,
but also any floppy or CD/DVD disks in those drives too. Since most PC BIOS
don't track the status of these drives, they will attempt to access them when
a request is made even if there isn't a disk in the drive.

I understand why it would access it once; but why over and over and over
again, and only towards the end of a full scan?

This has come up in Joe Faulhaber's thread about 'What we want to see in
Defender in the future', in which he suggests using filemon to track what's
happening - so maybe I can answer my own question shortly.

 

[Guest]

I`m running a notebook with a USB floppy and experience the same problem.
So, you are not alone.

Stu, at Joe Faulhaber's suggestion, I've been using Filemon to log when the
floppy drive is being accessed during a Defender full scan. Very strange
results. In my case the floppy is accessed more than 700 times during a
period of about 2 minutes just before the end of a full scan. Most of those
cases seem to be attempts by Defender to follow up shortcuts to files that on
some previous occasion were saved to floppy (but of course it can't, since
they aren't there). But if you delete the shortcuts, it still happens - and a
registry search shows up nothing.

It's all very mysterious. If you want to try it, you can get Filemon at
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/filemon.mspx. If you
set 'volumes' to be logged as just the floppy, and then start the Defender
scan, you'll see nothing until the action starts.