New hard disks and DriveSpace


Tip
Your article in the May issue re installing an additional hard drive (Heaps of Hard Disk, p94) was extremely timely. I am running a 1.6Gb Western Digital disk partitioned into four logical drives (namely C:, D:, E:, and F:). H: is assigned to the CD-ROM, and D: and E: are being compressed with DriveSpace 3.0. As usual, free disk space was at a premium on all drives, so, being more concerned with space rather than performance, I invested in a 6.5Gb Quantum Bigfoot. I formatted this as one Extended DOS partition, then created three logical drives (G:, H:, and I: ) with the intention of moving D: to G:, E: to H: and F: to I:, and subsequently remove D:, E: and F: and expand C: to the maximum. Doing this would alleviate the need to reinstall all my software as all Shortcuts, links, INI settings, registry entries, etc would remain unchanged. This appeared to be the easiest solution to upgrading.
Unfortunately, there is a bug (undocumented feature!) in DriveSpace. When it is run for the first time it creates a registry entry designating the number of existing drives, including CD-ROM, presumably so it can allocate host drive letters. When you subsequently add another hard drive it does not re-evaluate the system. So after adding my new drive, Windows 95 would only show drives C: through H: -- these being the four original partitions plus the first partition on the new drive. It totally refused to acknowledge the next three partitions and the CD-ROM, although any DOS or Win3.1 program could access all drives. DriveSpace would show the new drives as "Hidden", the same as a host drive, but the option to Hide/Unhide the drive was greyed out and not available.
Having started looking for the solution at the beginning of the week, in desperation I eventually contacted Microsoft Support on the Friday. After giving them a credit card number to pay for the service, I then spent approximately one hour discussing the problem with them. The call had been elevated through three levels of support in Sydney, when they decided the problem should be "escalated" in priority and forwarded to Microsoft in the US. They phoned me on the Monday afternoon with the fix. DriveSpace creates a Registry entry in
"HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies \Explorer" with a DWORD value of "NoDrives". The solution is to set this value to 0, or simply to delete "NoDrives". I subsequently searched Microsoft's Knowledge Base on the Internet, and discovered the article relating to this problem. The reference is Q136597 (http://www.microsoft.com/kb/articles/q136/5/97.htm) and it was created on 11/9/95, within weeks of Windows 95 being released, and according to its status, Microsoft is still researching this problem.
I hope that this bit of information will assist anyone else who attempts to add a new drive to their system.
- Bob Hampton

Category: Hardware, Win95
Issue: Aug 1997
Pages: 156

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