CDRLabs.com

I think I've finally got to the bottom of the multimounter problems I (and others) have been having. This is the problem where the Volumes tab doesn't appear on the CD drive properties dialog. I'm interested to hear if the observations I make below are true for other sufferers.

It seems the multimounter doesn't like it if the drive letter of the CD-RW drive is changed. On all of my systems, I generally move CD/DVD drives towards the end of the alphabet to leave room for additional hard disks. For example, on one system, I have both a DVD reader and a DVD writer - I assign these drive letters R: and W: respectively (for read/write), which also means I don't confuse them in Windows Explorer.

I've been doing a lot of testing to get to the bottom of this. I had one clean WinXP install on which the Volumes tab appeared, and a clean Win2K system (upgraded to WinXP) that didn't show the Volumes tab. The two test systems have only one hard disk and one CD burner. In the clean WinXP install I had left the CD burner at D: and, as I said, the multimounter works perfectly. For the upgraded system, I had (by habit) moved the CD drive up to R:. When I reassigned the drive to D:, the Volumes tab appeared as if by magic!! This is 100% repeatable.... moving the drive to a different letter eliminates the Volumes tab, bringing it back to D: makes the tab reappear.

So, it seems that the multimounter code needs to be a bit smarter in order to be able to recognise that CD drive letters are not necessarily at their default settings, and (as in my case) multiple drives may have discontiguous letter assignments.

I really don't want to have to switch my drive letters back to their defaults so, assuming my analysis is correct, I'm hoping that the multimounter code will be fixed. I have notified Ahead of my findings....

raichea wrote:I've been doing a lot of testing to get to the bottom of this. I had one clean WinXP install on which the Volumes tab appeared, and a clean Win2K system (upgraded to WinXP) that didn't show the Volumes tab. The two test systems have only one hard disk and one CD burner. In the clean WinXP install I had left the CD burner at D: and, as I said, the multimounter works perfectly. For the upgraded system, I had (by habit) moved the CD drive up to R:. When I reassigned the drive to D:, the Volumes tab appeared as if by magic!! This is 100% repeatable.... moving the drive to a different letter eliminates the Volumes tab, bringing it back to D: makes the tab reappear.

it's a pity you didn't test it under the same conditions.
in one case you changed the letter and in one you didn't.
but these 2 were'nt done on the same kind of system!
how do you know that the "cause" of the problem is the drive letter change and not the difference in OS?

Thanks to Raichea and all his hard efforst, I was finally able to duplicate this problem report on my W2K systems.

I have generated a bug report on this issue and hopefully it will be resovled quickly.

Thanks for all your efforts and feedback Raichea, it's greatly appreciated by everyone at Ahead.

Regards,

Craig

dodecahedron wrote:it's a pity you didn't test it under the same conditions.
in one case you changed the letter and in one you didn't.
but these 2 were'nt done on the same kind of system!
how do you know that the "cause" of the problem is the drive letter change and not the difference in OS?

The text I wrote reads as though this all happened over a few hours. In fact, I have been tracking down this problem for about 8 weeks, using odd moments of spare time.

In an ideal world, you are correct, and I'd have only changed one variable at a time, but I didn't build these systems purely to chase the bug - I just took opportunities to use them as they arose.

As I said, the problem is 100% repeatable by changing the drive letter, so I am confident this is the problem, and now Ahead have replicated the bug.

no criticism intended