Powershell causes a: to seek when it starts; how do I stop this?

Question

I've written a powershell script that I've turned into a scheduled task. So far, so good. The issue I have is that every time Powershell is started, it causes my floppy drive to seek; this means every five minutes (on the task schedule), I get a little "grind" from the floppy drive.

How do I disable this behavior?

    C:\fa>powershell -noprofile
    Windows PowerShell
    Copyright (C) 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

    PS C:\fa> exit

    C:\fa>

When I do this test, I get a seek when I start and when I exit. I assume the error would go away if I had a floppy disk to put in the drive.

As a poor work-around, I disabled the floppy drive in BIOS. I've removed the red herring about the drive not being available; this was because of another issue.

The suggested way to find what, in my profile, points to A:, turned up nothing.

PS C:\fa2> dir Env:\ | ?{$_.Value -like "A:\*"}
PS C:\fa2>

this was, of course, after I re-enabled the floppy drive in BIOS.

Answer 1

It could be something in your profile script(s). I've not experienced PowerShell causing any floppy drive activity...
If you start PowerShell.exe with the -noprofile option, it will not run the profile scripts (so long as your script does not depend on anything from your profile).

Answer 2

I think it may be a permissions problem. Can you access the drive outside of PowerShell?

I found a couple references to this problem here and here.

Answer 3

Check to make sure nothing in your Environment is pointing to the drive.

 dir Env:\ | ?{$_.Value -like "A:\*"}

Answer 4

Stop using floppy disks?

/ducks

Answer 5

I'd say its the drive enumeration that happens at runtime. Powershell builds a list of drives and creates aliases for each one so you can type "A:" and have it work like cmd.exe. I think this because if you start Powershell on a clustered server, that does not own a shared drive (is owned by the other node), it issues an error saying that the drive is not accessible. Yet, everything is normal in the shell.

That being said I've never seen this behaviour (floppy drive seek on load) on any of the hundreds of machines I administer.