Hello Bill,

I was getting a bit confused about starting up Guide from the harddisk. On your website it says:
Q: I want to run Guide from my hard drive. How can I do this?
A: This was once a real pain to do, but is now quite simple. Guide 7.0 users should read these instructions. Guide 8.0 users should look at chapter 17c of the user manual.
However the link under this chapter 17c takes you to page 56 of the manual, which is about DSS images. (But this is just a small detail).
I wanted to check the page about starting Guide from the harddisk because I lost track of all different messages in the group discussion through email that we received.
Trying to solve this issue myself I got caught up in it in the same way as was reported here before. This is how I got the same error message as reported before.
My Guide did not show any star whatsoever anymore, in spite of fiddling with the settings. So I decided to reinstall the program.
The program was not listed in Control Panel, Software, is that right? Guide apparently does not put any entries in the registry. I deleted the shortcut from the desktop and the directory from the root, cleaned the wastebin, and rebooted the pc. Then I reinstalled the program.
Using the normal guide8.exe started the program in the normal way. Then I downloaded the guide8.zip from the website and installed the files into the guide8 directory.
Then I changed the entry for line 18 in the startup.mar to have guide run from the directory "guidecd" on the harddisk. This created the message "Guide needs the cd for .........etc" followed by the message "Near memory: 7 allocations 55706 bytes" when starting guide without the cd in the drive.
I realised then - silly me - than I can change this entry in the startup file to have guide startup from the harddisk but the files that guide needs to do the startup with (from the cd), needs to be present on the harddisk first. So I copied the contents of the first cd into the "guidecd" directory in the root (not in the guide8 directory). This however did not make any change, to my surprise, still same error messages.
Untill I found out that copying the cd had not been done to a "guidecd" directory but to a subdirectory of this directory. After cutting and pasting all the files from this subdirectory into the "guidecd" directory, the program now runs fine without the cd.
So in my case the error was caused by the line 18 drive command in startup.mar not finding the right files it expected to start guide with.
But I guess you will have the overview what goes on here and hopefully will help you solve this puzzle.

Another small question is about the star size for stars downloaded from USNO-A/B or GSC or 2MASS etc. It is possible to extend the settings screen in the menu Display, Star Display to include a field with settings for the the display of downloaded stars, or can the present fields for the settings been changed to have their effect on the downloaded stars as well?


Greetings,

Geert Hoogeveen


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]