Everytime my computer starts up, it keeps searching for floppy drive A and it keeps making a horrible grunting noise. I seem to remember that there was tool in windows 98 that allowed you to turn this feature off Something like "primary roe of this computer" - whether it was desktop or laptop and the speed of the CD-ROm and there was also an option to not search for floppy drives at startup. i can no longer remember what this program was. I tried using msconfig, but it wasn't there. Any help would be gratefully received.

This wasn't a program as such, but was a feature of the Windows 9x series - it was in System/Performance in the control panel and is not present in Windows 2000/XP. Have you got anti virus software running on the machine? Some of those have an option to scan the floppy drive on boot up or shutdown. If you have, check to see if this option is there and make sure it's not enabled. Another, probably more likely reason, is that you have ran a document from a floppy disk and it has gone onto your "Documents" list on the start menu. This might cause Windows to keep looking at the drive.

I'm not aware of any feature in 98 that did that, not to say there isn't one. Boot to the BIOS and disable the floppy drive as one of the boot devices. This will stop the floppy seek. Should you need to ever boot from a floppy disk simply enable at that time.

no, the first guy is quite correct, i have just looked it up on a win98 machine as he described and its there, but it isn't on the 2000 computer. No, there are no documents saved to this drive, ever. However, i do not want to disable this device.

Changing the boot settings will not disable the floppy drive. As long as the floppy controller is enabled in the BIOS your floppy drive will work and in Windows there will be an icon for it.

i was not trying to disable the floppy drive. The computer keeps searching for a floppy drive when the computer starts and it keeps making a horrible crunching sound. With windows 98 you could switch this search off, although you still had your floppy drive available after you logged in. i have seen this feature on every copy of windows 2000 to date. Q Is there a way to stop windows searching for the drive at startup, but still have it available after you log on?

peacock did you READ my prior replies? "Changing the boot settings will not disable the floppy drive. As long as the floppy controller is enabled in the BIOS your floppy drive will work and in Windows there will be an icon for it". As long as you continue to keep the floppy drive in the boot order the seeking will continue. I don't know how to make this any clearer.