Phantom DOS files in my root

Jeff Atwood

13 Jun 2005 — 1 min read — Comments

Maybe it’s just my OCD kicking in again, but it’s incredibly annoying how these phantom, zero-byte IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS files keep showing up in the root of my c: drive on every computer I own.

It’s a gentle reminder of the Bad Old Days. The last time I checked, I wasn’t running DOS 6.22, Win95, Win98SE, or even WinME. No matter how many times I delete these spurious DOS-related files, the next time I look – they’re back. What’s next? AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS? HIMEM.SYS and optimizing my high memory area? Argh.

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