Checking for media in drives

[Dave Cragg]

At 7:40 pm -0500 23/12/02, Braintree Athletics wrote:
>Putting  "the drives" or "the volumes" will give you a list of 
>available drives
>with media in MacOS.  In win95, 98 and XP you get a list of all mechanically
>attached equipment.  If you then do a "If there is 
>a:/mydisk/myfolder then ..."
>line of code you get some whirling and clicking in 95 and 98 - but no error
>message from an empty floppy drive.  In XP if you check for a folder 
>or file in
>a drive that does not contain media - you get a system error message from XP.
>
>Is there any way in XP (and 95/98) to check to see if there is media 
>in a drive
>without getting an error message?
>
>Thanks for your help!

No great help, but a little more information. The system error 
message you describe doesn't always occur in XP, and it can occur in 
other Windows versions. I've seen it in NT 4.0, and have had reports 
of it happening with Win 2000.

I first experienced it  when scanning drives for a file on a CD after 
re-installing XP. Previously, with XP on the same machine, I hadn't 
got the message. I did a search on the web, and came across a similar 
story concerning a software installer (unrelated to Metacard) that 
scanned drives during its install. Some people were getting the 
message and others weren't. One report described two identical 
machines, only one of which had the problem . The machine not 
experiencing the problem was apparently loaded with much more 
software. Intrigued, I installed some more software on my machine, 
and the problem disappeared and hasn't returned.

I guess that leaves you more puzzled than before. :)

Cheers
Dave