Coding Horror

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Phantom DOS files in my root

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.

Phantom DOS boot files in the root

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.

Written by Jeff Atwood

Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here: https://infosec.exchange/@codinghorror