Phantom Floppy Drive

[fuzzymillipede]

I have been running a typical installation of Windows XP for several years, and encountered a weird error yesterday. When I try to start my computer, it displays errors about a floppy drive failure upon boot-up. When I proceeded past the error for the first time and got to my desktop, I saw the "Windows has detected new hardware" message.

Now there is a 3 1/2 Floppy Drive listed under My Computer. When I go to look at its properties, the computer hangs for a while before finally telling me that it is "Manufacturer: (Standard floppy disk drives)" and using "Standard floppy disk controller."

The problem is that I have never had a floppy drive in my computer. What could cause this to happen? Could it be a loose cable or something?

[Dominus Atheos]

Go into the BIOS and disable the floppy drive in there.