Thank you to Kevin and Joe for their explanations about the drive letters.

Concerning the star blops, I have made some tests
Using Guide 7, version of 6 december 2001
Startup.mar contains "18 drive e:\"
No Guide 7 CD ROM in drive
No copy on the hard disk
The Zip drive is external SCSI

1. Zip drive connected and powered (letter e:)
No Zip disk inserted
Guide displays the "blob stars" that Stuart described.

2. Then I unplugged the power cord
Zip drive still present in the Windows Explorer
and in [Control Panel | System | Device Manager]
Guide seems to cause the system to hang.
Killing Guide with Alt-Ctrl-Del work well.

3. Made a refresh of the Device Manager
No more Zip drive neither in Windows Explorer nor in Device Manager
After the launch of Guide, the system stops responding :-( => Reset

4. After reboot, CD-ROM drive has letter E:
Guide displays the "blob stars" (no Guide CD-ROM present)


In never saw the "Guide needs the CD" message with Guide 7.

Since the PC just rebooted, is it possible that the caches still contain
pertinent informations ?


I have no experience of "blob stars" with Guide 8 because it is installed on a
faster computer which has no Zip drive. But just for testing purposes, I have
connected an USB Zip 250 drive. The letter assigned to the Zip (F:) comes
after the one assigned to the CD drive (E:). So whether it is connected or
not, there shoud be no problem for Guide.

Whatever the content of the line 18 in startup.mar, if it does not point to a
valid place where Guide can find his data, the "Guide needs the CD" message is
displayed.

About the caches not updated, it makes me think about the option "Auto insert
notification": I ran Guide with the CD in the drive, closed Guide, inserted
another CD and ran Guide again. The content of the CD was read and Guide
recognized it was not "his" CD that was in the drive.

So I was unable to reproduce the display of "blob stars" with Guide 8, even
with the initial version of the CD-ROM and I don't know what I could do to
reproduce them again with Guide 8.


Cordialement

Laurent Zimmermann
http://users.skynet.be/zmn/cab

----- Original Message -----
From: Bill J Gray <pluto@...>
To: <guide-user@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, April 13, 2002 2:36 AM
Subject: [guide-user] Star blobs/PA/2000 YE44


> Hi Stuart, Laurent,
>
> As Laurent suggested, this does sound like a sort of behavior Guide
> used to have when started without a CD in the drive, and when nothing
> had been installed to the hard drive. I say "used to have", because I
> fixed this a while back in Guide 7. You mention use of the current
> version, so you shouldn't see this problem; if you run Guide without
> the CD and without anything installed to the hard drive, you should get
> a "Guide needs the CD" message.
>
> But there is one possible "gotcha" here, something I'd not considered
> until both of you mentioned use of Zip drives. Guide starts up and looks
> for two files, one from CD 1 and one from CD 2. My guess is that Guide
> _is_ finding at least the test file from CD 1, perhaps because it's still
> in the Zip drive's cache. (This used to be a real headache with some
> CD drives. You could swap CDs, do a "directory" command, and see
> files from the previous CD. Only when the cache ran out would the
> device be bright enough to reload the file tables.)
>
> Does this sound as if it might cover the misbehavior you're seeing?
>