Monday, August 15, 2005

VJ Day all over again!

Well not exactly, but I feel victorious.

I've had a problem that had me stumped for months. I have a desktop system that I added a USB multi-format memory card reader to after Christmas. Then, whenever I rebooted, I got a pop-up window that stated "There is no disk in the drive. Please insert a disk into drive." Many of the boot processes had begun running but the system wouldn't complete the boot until this was cleared. If I removed the card reader and rebooted, everything was fine.

I had searched through the registry looking for references to those drives with no luck. Besides msconfig, I had run several other startup diagnostic programs including StartupRun from nirsoft.net and codestuff's Starter with no hits.

So where to turn? GOOGLE! Imagine that.

I Googled the symptom, '"no disk in the drive" at boot' and came up with lots of hits. But once you threw out the ones with hardware errors, there was still a recurring problem that some of us were having. Then BINGO, I came across this one. It seems to have been around a while with no resolution from the GTK folks. GTK+ is a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces that is used by a number of open source initiatives, e.g. Gaim. I run Gaim as a multi-protocol instant messaging client.

I experimented with my card reader and proved that this was the problem. Everything was fine when I put a MemoryStick in the slot that is presented as drive I:. I tried disabling that device but it returned at reboot.

Eventually, I found a workaround. Right click on "My Computer" and choose "Manage." Then click on "Disk Management" and scroll down IN THE BOTTOM HALF OF THE WINDOW to find the I: drive. Right click and choose "Change Drive Letter..." I changed mine from I: to S:. With a reboot, the problem was gone.

Chalk up another one to Google.

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