Need help turning off an XP "feature"

[networkman]

Apparently, Microsoft thought that a great feature for Windows XP would be to have it retain a cache of the contents of a floppy disk or CD with the idea being that access time could be improved with reads and writes to the disk. Makes sense to me.

However, in the environment that we have at my work(library), many PCs are available to the Public and many use floppy disks for transporting resumes and the like. As you can imagine, many different disks are being inserted and this XP "feature" is beoming a bit tiresome as only a restart of the machine will clear the "cache" of the first floppy disk before a 2nd disk can be read or written to.

I'm hoping for a nice Regedit that would turn off this "feature".

Thanks in advance for any helpful ideas. 🙂

 

[imported_Ned Flanders]

I didn't even know this existed? Where is the cache stored?

 

[loup garou]

This is not an XP issue, believe it or not, you probably have a bad floppy cable, or drive, or controller:

http://www.duxcw.com/yabbse/index.php?b...5;action=display;threadid=5424&start=0

 

[Smilin]

uh.

put the floppy in and hit F5.

The "cache" is of the display and sits in memory.

 

[networkman]

I should've added this to the original post, but I've seen the articles on bad floppy drives; suffice to say, that isn't the issue, as I can reproduce the issue on perfectly working machines and floppy drives. Additionally, we're talking 200+ machines here, all brand new, all with same problem.

Edit: And F5 does NOT always work, as the posts in other forums have also indicated.

 

[Smilin]

Can you post a set of Grandma-friendly instructions on how to repro this?

I'm not 100% that I'm getting what the problem is.

 

[imported_Ned Flanders]

Are you saying that AFTER you remove a floppy from the drive, its contents are still viewable - And by that I mean you can open them and view their contents (not just the filename etc)

 

[networkman]

Originally posted by: Ned Flanders
Are you saying that AFTER you remove a floppy from the drive, its contents are still viewable - And by that I mean you can open them and view their contents (not just the filename etc)

That is exactly what I am saying, even if the disk is no longer present in the drive. Correct!

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: networkman

Originally posted by: Ned Flanders
Are you saying that AFTER you remove a floppy from the drive, its contents are still viewable - And by that I mean you can open them and view their contents (not just the filename etc)

That is exactly what I am saying, even if the disk is no longer present in the drive. Correct!

Please forgive me but I'm not wrapping my head around this right...

So lets say you do this:
1. Put a blank floppy in the drive.
2. Open it in explorer.
3. Right click > New > text document
4. Open "New text document.txt" and type some stuff.
5. Save and close.
6. Remove the floppy from the drive.
7. You still see the open window with "new text document.txt" sitting there.
8. Open "new text document.txt" and your stuff is still there.

I'm following all of this until step 8. I have never in my life seen step 8 work. Step 7, yes. Not step 8.

Is this what is really happening???

 

[networkman]

You got it - exactly as stated. I wouldn't've believed it either if I hadn't seen it.

 

[Smilin]

Wow.

Ok, I'll do a bit of digging here in the internal KB for ya (time permitting). As far as I know that is not standard behavior at all. Not a "feature" that I'm aware of.

 

[Smilin]

haha, ok still looking but so far nothing on this. I found one mention of it in a KB article that is so old it is no longer published (and doesn't apply anyway).


From KB88145 (yes that's a 5 digit kb article!)

SYMPTOMS
SMARTDrive (SMARTDRV.EXE) version 4.0 from Windows 3.1 shows the status of floppy drives A and B, even if no floppy disk drives are installed.
WORKAROUND
To work around this problem, specifically instruct SMARTDrive not to cache the missing floppy drives. For example, type the following at the MS-DOS command prompt:
c:\windows\smartdrv.exe a- b-


I'll let you know if I find anything else but it is looking pretty grim.

I would suggest an MSConfig clean boot to see if you still have the behavior. Could be something 3rd party.