15 Problems That Your Plague Your PC
And How to Solve Them


--by Karen Kenworthy, Contributing Editor, Fred Langa, Senior 
Consulting Editor, John Woram, Consulting Editor, Serdar 
Yegulalp, Technology Editor


** Problem No 4: 
My PC and I disagree on how many drives I have. **

Solution:
If you try to access your D: drive and Windows tells you you 
don't have one, or you see a drive listed that you know doesn't 
exist, you may have a CMOS problem. In the case of a missing 
diskette drive, open a DOS window and try to log onto that 
drive. If it's unavailable, run your PC's CMOS configuration 
utility, usually by pressing the Delete key when prompted to do 
so during bootup. Make sure the status for each installed 
diskette drive is correct, then reboot. You may be able to view 
the configuration from within a DOS window by pressing 
Ctrl+Alt+Enter or a similar key combination. This is handy for 
verifying the configuration, but you should make all changes 
from outside the Windows GUI, and follow up with a reboot.

Once all drives are available from a DOS command prompt, run 
Windows' Tweak UI applet, select the My Computer tab and make 
sure all drive letters are checked. Or, run RegEdit and open 
the following Registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\
Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

If you see a NoDrives entry, you should see either 00 00 00 00 
or 0x00000000 (0) in its Data column, indicating no drives are 
disabled. If a nonzero value appears, double-click the NoDrives 
entry and change the values to all zeros. A disabled drive may 
cause odd side-effects, such as grayed-out Open and Explore 
options on the Start button's Context menu, so make sure all 
drives are enabled, even if you don't have a drive B:, 
for example.


 1998 Windows Magazine, April 1999, Page 112.