"Stan Hilliard" wrote in message news
This started in the last few days. The empty floppy drive (A grinds
away for about 10 seconds at startup. What could have caused this and
how can I stop it?
There's a switch inside that tells the system that a disk is in the drive.
Perhaps it is stuck?
Try putting a floppy in and then ejecting it to possibly "unstick" the switch.
Clean the drive.
Replace the drive.
Or, by "startup" do you mean the Windows startup? If so, that's usually
a software matter with some process wanting to access the disk.