When I first start up my machine each day, at the login screen 4 messages pop up which look like this:

There is no disk in the drive. Please insert a disk into drive \Device\harddisk2\DRx, where x is 11 in the first message, 12 in the second, 13 in the third, and 14 in the fourth. 

Note that I have the following "drives" in my system: A:, C:, D:, E:, F:, G:, H:, I:, J:, K:, L:, M:, N:, and O: Drives L through O are the "removable disks" in a flash media 8-in-1 hardware unit that I have installed in one of the 3.5" bays of my computer. I actually have two 160 GB hard drives installed which contain all the other "drives". 

Also note that if you count down from the A: drive, that drives L through O correspond to the 11, 12, 13, 14 in the error message. So the problem is related to that piece of hardware . . . and, in fact, the problem started just after I installed a flash media reader 8-in-1 unit in one of the 3.5" bays of my machine. 

If I uninstall the hardware, the error messages will disappear. Not what I want to do. This hardware should be able to sit here with no flash media in it and produce no error messages whatsoever. So I went searching on the Internet for answers.

First I went to the Microsoft Knowledgebase (MSKB) at http://support.microsoft.com. The closest I could come to my problem was a write-up on when one such message would appear when trying to print a Microsoft Word document. To solve that problem, the MSKB suggests:

Change the drive letter assignments in Windows XP by following these steps:

• Log on to the computer as Administrator.
• Insert a disk in the removable drive.
• Click Start, right-click My Computer, and then click Manage.
• Click Disk Management.
• Right-click the partition, logical drive, or volume that you want to change, and then click Change Drive Letter and Paths.
• Click the removable drive, click it, click Change, click the drive letter that you want to use, and then click OK.

I didn't have flash media that could fill all four slots, but I did fill one to see if one of the messages would go away. No luck. So I pursued other solutions.

On one Internet forum I found a discussion linking such an error to Quicktime (I have Quicktime Pro on this machine). One person described having used Quicktime (QT) when viewing pictures on flash media and that his error occurred every time he opened QT. His solution was to:

• Open QT
• Click on File
• Click on Open Recent, then at the bottom of the list click on Clear Menu

This wasn't my problem; but it did get me thinking: some program must be trying to reference all four removable drives and isn't finding them . . . and that results in the errors. The question is: what program? Could it be Windows XP Pro itself? With some 300 + software products installed on this machine, finding the culprit seemed like I'd be looking for a needle in a haystack. So I continued looking for some simple fix out there.

I found this comment in another forum:

"I had a similar situation happen in Windows 2000 when I popped a smart card out of a USB reader before I closed the application that I had opened it in. (I was done with the data file and had closed it, but the program apparently didn't agree. -_-;;;) Anyhow, after that the same error message you've been getting would pop up almost anytime I wanted to use an application. Finally I found out that if I used the unplug/eject option in Win2K to stop the USB reader, the message would go away. I'm still pondering a long-term solution, but hopefully you might find this helpful."

Looked like someone was having a problem a little more like mine; the program that could be causing the problem might be, for instance, PowerDesk Pro 6 (a high-powered big brother to Windows Explorer) which I have installed on this machine. So I changed the settings in preferences for that program so it wouldn't view the removable drives . . . and that didn't solve the problem.

So, so far, I'm stuck. No solution to this has presented itself. Fortunately, the error messages don't affect the operation of this machine at all. Consequently, I can cancel out the error messages and proceed as if they'd never happened; but they are a nuisance..

If anyone has any other potential solutions to this problem, please let me know.

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