Any suggestions?

[ainwood]

I have recently upgraded to Win XP directly from Win ME.

Every time I try to run an application from the CD Rom (and
occasionally from the hard drive), I get the following error:

Explorer.exe - No Disk.
There is no disk in the drive. Please insert a disk into drive A:.

I can "Cancel", "Try Again" or "Continue". All three just bring the
same dialog box up again. Note that this is NOT the same message I
gbet when I try to access "A:\" drive directly with no disk inserted).
And when I run these applications, windows does try to access A:\
drive (if I have a disk in the drive, it checks it, then starts the
program normally).

I saw a suggestion that it may be because A:\ drive is included in
either the path statement in system properties, or in the autoexec.bat
file. It is in neither of these.


Any suggestions greatly appreciated - I don't want to have to disable
the A:\ drive - I still get some use out of it!

 

[King of Camelot]

Hmm, so in autoexec the windir is hard drive(whatever letter)\windows? Odd because it seems to be looking for explorer on the A:\. Maybe a little more info on the system would help. Or just wait for starlifter.

 

[starlifter]

I have recently upgraded to Win XP directly from Win ME.

At this point, I have not (yet) read the rest of your post. This is a bad idea. bad bad bad..... It may work.... sometimes..... sort of.... but you need to do a totally clean, fresh install unless you like to live in the world of MS legacy problems. Even MS is up front about this.... they don't recommend it either

Now, back to reading the post....


There are several dozen things that can cause this, but you might try :

- Clear the Documents menu
- Clear the Start Menu "Run" command history
- Check for Viruses, esp the Neuville virus
- Search your computer for all shortcuts that point to porgrams on the Floppy (Use the find function is my advice)
- Search you registry for references to a:
- In the Registry, Look for .OCX and .DLL files in the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/CLSID on your floppy drive.
- Search your entier computer for all .INI file for references to a:
- Run a 3rd party utility, like Fix It 4.0
- Do a fresh install of XP
- Use LInux.

Those are the easiest things to do

PS, Back up your registry before you attempt changes to it, esp. if you are new to editing the registry.

 

[IceBlaZe]

Am I missing something here?
Starlifter I thought you are a soldier, not a helpdesk support staff of Microsoft

 

[starlifter]

Starlifter I thought you are a soldier, not a helpdesk support staff of Microsoft

I have spent thousands of hours flying planes, but probably thousands more doing computer crapola.... all the way back to the early days of the PC. It's all self-defense.... never my primary job. In college, Texas Instruments delivered TI PC's to our engineering school in '83, and the next year, I noticed these boxes being unused. I asked the Professor in charge of our Junior design class about them, and he had no idea what to use them for. I looked into it (PCs were too expensive for most "regular" people to won back then), and said we could use them to run programs and simulations with faster turnaround time than the University's mainframe. And the Engineering Dept. would not be billed for Computing Services (all paper, core time, etc. that students use gets billed to the Dept & Class, which has limited funds).

Well, the prof let me have them, I learned PCDOS and its headaches), and in 1984, we did all our designs on them..... since the entire class had to design fully an airplane as a team, guess who then had to teach about 35% of the class that year, LOL. I was the student, but lecturing one day per week... quite a conflict of interest, eh?

And it grew from that... each job I had, they said "who knows about these machines".... and it turned out to be me, so I had to work after duty hours on those things. And to this very day, LOL. In ther early and mid '90s, I'd be writing IBM, DR, MS, Adaptec, etc. about how to debug/fix their respective programs, esp. when first released. MS was never too responsive, but IBM & DR were quite grateful, esp. since (IMHO) their own employees should have caught a lot of what go out.

But it's never "easy"..... the school of hard knocks = a better diploma for the "operational" world than even a MS in CS for a lot of stuff. Of course, I have an MS, too (AI design [but not game AI per se] was one of my independent design topics).

LOL, I was at the Swedish Consulate the other day for a quick stop, and I saw some of their PC's not configured optimally, and a little while later, we had them all fixed, hehehe.... I normally don't let on in real life what I know, as I can never get away once the questions start coming ..........

I'm weakest on XP, though, because I oppose where it is headed in terms of MS's strategic plan (long story), and so I personally don't have it installed. Though I do have friends in the rank and file at MS (which is half an hour away). LOL, they wanted me to come help work on their NT kernal (what turned out to be named W2K & XP) several years ago. But I've had enough programming, thanks.

So yes, I know a lot about MS (butno one living knows everything!!! ).... mainly because it is the DeFacto standard even in the Military (except for systems that must be reliable, then no MS code is allowed).

Oh well.

 

[ainwood]

Originally posted by starlifter
At this point, I have not (yet) read the rest of your post. This is a bad idea. bad bad bad..... It may work.... sometimes..... sort of.... but you need to do a totally clean, fresh install unless you like to live in the world of MS legacy problems. Even MS is up front about this.... they don't recommend it either

Hmm. My PC came with Win ME, which was a real dog at times. I didn't get a installation CD with it - it is instead in a hidden partition of the HD, which is really annoying. I wasn't sure of the best way to upgrade the OS, as I wasn't sure how to delete the hidden partition, and didn't really want to - If I've "paid" for software, I don't really like to over-write it. I therefore bought an upgrade version of Win XP. AFAIK, I can still reformat the HD, and install XP from the CD - all that happens is it asks me to insert a valid windows CD from a previous version - doesn't it....

Now, back to reading the post....


There are several dozen things that can cause this, but you might try :

- Clear the Documents menu
- Clear the Start Menu "Run" command history
- Check for Viruses, esp the Neuville virus
- Search your computer for all shortcuts that point to porgrams on the Floppy (Use the find function is my advice)
- Search you registry for references to a:
- In the Registry, Look for .OCX and .DLL files in the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/CLSID on your floppy drive.
- Search your entier computer for all .INI file for references to a:
- Run a 3rd party utility, like Fix It 4.0
- Do a fresh install of XP
- Use LInux.

Those are the easiest things to do

PS, Back up your registry before you attempt changes to it, esp. if you are new to editing the registry. [/B]

Yes, I will try a few of those. I have played with editing the registry before, so not too worried about that - I'm more concerned with the shear amount of work required - especially searching through the .ini files etc (although a small VB program would do this in a few seconds :enlighten .Anyway, Thanks for the suggestions, and I'll give it a go.

 

[starlifter]

I therefore bought an upgrade version of Win XP. AFAIK, I can still reformat the HD, and install XP from the CD - all that happens is it asks me to insert a valid windows CD from a previous version - doesn't it..

I would not necessarily rush out and do a fresh install, but I would do it eventaully... when it's convenient.

I have not installed XP, for certain reasons of principle and right to privacy the XP and it's follow on (or upgrades) violate. But I'd read the MS site about it beforehand. MS is not always logical about the way they do things.

You may well have to make the dreaded "10 minute" call to the MS tech person for XP to get authorization to re-install it. MS claims 10 minute max, but........

With that XP version, it examines your system and hardware, and reports it to MS when you get online. MS claims they will do nothing with the info they are accumulating on all the XP users in the world (and to be fair, at this date, MS is choosing not to upload data (by name) on your personal files, websites you surf, financial records, etc.). But Bill Gates and MS are comitted at this time to an utterly massive database of all the world's users of MS OS's and software, and get this.... they have already prototyped the code for blocking your use of programs on your machine until MS approves your mouse click in real time. For instance, Bill plans to sell MS Office as a "partial" program (he won't advertize it that way), and every time you want to use MS Word or Excel, etc. your mouseclick would be sent to the central MS servers, processed, indexed against your registration (name, hardware, program list, etc.) that MS will keep on you, and then decides if it is OK to allow you to run Word or Excel. They log the time, frequency, etc. and will use it themselves for marketing and selling to 3rd parties, like advertisers, pollsters, etc. for bg bucks. They will also sell it to special interest groups, private detectives, and anyone with the $$.

To understand this, you have to know a lot about Bill Gates in the 1975-1983 years and his paranoias, which I won't get into.

BTW, the MSN server farm and all it's problems are the proving ground for the massively enormous database to track, spy on, and literally control all the PCs in real time, all over the world. XP only transmits what is called a "hash" of your system info right now, and this Hash info in the MS database is what you may have to call the Tech people at MS for "permission" to do a re-install. I think at the moment, that if you do NOT change your hardware (and in particular your network card), the re-install should go OK. But check the MS site.

If you want MS not to pry into your machine and report back to Redmond, then run Win2K or get a developer's copy of XP (or certain "business-only" versions).

Welcome to Big Brother, M$ style!!


www.microsoft.com