Stopping the Windows – No Disk Error

If you have a “card reader” on your system you may get a Windows error message that pops up when you start certain programs (such as the CCRSoftware applications) that is titled Windows – No Disk. You may get this several times in a row before the software starts. Here are some ideas on how to deal with this.

The error notification you will see is something like this:

The typical situation where you see this is if you have a “card reader” device (one used to read SD cards from your camera, etc.), and for some reason a program is trying to get a list of all drives. If there is no media in the drive then Windows generates this error, and you have to click one of the buttons. If you have a card reader like I have on my system then you have multiple “slots” for various kinds of cards, and you get an error message for each one.

This does not cause problems, it is just annoying.

At this time we aren’t sure why you sometimes see this message. We had it popping up on one of our development systems and started to pin down what the issue was, when it stopped occurring. We thought we had fixed it (hey – if the error goes away, it must be fixed, right?) until this week when another customer reported it. Until we have the ability to duplicate it in our office (and prove that we can fix it – look up Koch’s Postulates to see what we are looking for, although that comes from my biology background), we can’t be sure that we have gotten rid of it.

Here are some things to try. PLEASE NOTE that some of these are very technical fixes, and if you do NOT understand them, don’t try them yourself!

Close Your Drives Properly

Some reports on the Internet seem to indicate that this error happens if you have used the drive and then removed the media without using the “safe to remove” feature. The computer things something is supposed to be there, but it isn’t. The answer should then be to insert a card and then use the “safe to remove” feature. I don’t think that this will be the resolution for the problem, but a lot of people have reported that…

Modify Your Registry

DO NOT TRY THIS IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT IT MEANS. You can modify your Windows Registry with a registry editor (and if you haven’t used one, don’t try this on your own).

Locate the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\
Control\Windows\ErrorMode

Normally you will find a value of “0” here. Change this to a value of “2” and close the registry.

What you are doing here is disabling the popup error message for the handling of hard errors. This includes “disk not in drive” errors and general protection (GP) faults. Instead of seeing them pop up on your screen, they will be logged to the Windows event log. This is pretty much the same as clicking on the “continue” button, which is what most people do anyways.

I’ve seen people set up this error mode on computers that are to run unattended (including servers) for long periods of time, to prevent them from freezing when these kinds of errors happen. QuickBooks will sometimes pop up GP errors, and if I’m going to leave my QuickBooks system running overnight to do a file rebuild on a big file, I usually set this registry.

Again, if you aren’t familiar with editing your registry, don’t try this.

Disable The Driver

Another way to get around the problem is to disable the driver for the card reader. This only works if you don’t want to use that card reader.

As before, if you aren’t familiar with working with device drivers on your system, don’t try this.

If this problems continues to plague you and you can’t (or won’t) try any of these workarounds, contact our tech support.

Category: General Tips