DriveReady application required

NOTE: This tip requires the third party command line utility DriveReady, which can be found at http://www.jsifaq.com/dl/drvready.zip.

> 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?

You can use the DriveReady command line utility at http://www.jsifaq.com/dl/drvready.zip. It must be run in a batch file though, so create a batch file like "testa.bat" and put the following in it:

 drvready.exe a: /q
 @echo %ERRORLEVEL%

Then call the batch file from the shell() command in MC. If it returns a 1, there is a disk in the drive. If it returns a 0, there is no disk in the drive. It does it silently, so there's not error dialogs or "please put in a disk" dialogs.

---

Update

In order to call this from MetaCard or Revolution, you can "cd" to the directory where DRVREADY.EXE is located, and then call the batch file (called "checkdrv.bat" in the example below). Here’s an example:

on mouseUp
  answer folder "Pick the location of DRVREADY:"
  if it <> "" then
    if DriveReady(it) then
      -- floppy is in the drive
    else
      -- no floppy is in the drive
    end if
  end if
end mouseUp

function DriveReady pPath
  replace "/" with "\" in pPath  -- convert to proper slashes
  set the hideConsoleWindows to true
  get shell("cd " & pPath & " & checkdrv.bat")
  if last line of it = 0 then
    -- no floppy in drive
    return false
  else
    -- floppy in drive
    return true
  end if
end mouseUp
			

Update 2/13/04:
Note: To clarify the update below, XP does NOT show an alert only if you have Service Pack 1 installed. Otherwise, it appears that this approach does not work properly in XP without the service pack (odd results from DriveReady are occurring).

Update 8/10/03:
Note: It turns out that Windows XP does NOT show an alert if there is no media in the drive, so you don't need DriveReady for a Windows XP test.

Posted 12/23/2002 by Ken Ray to the MetaCard List
Updated 1/18/2003 by Ken Ray
Updated 8/10/2003 by Ken Ray
Updated 2/13/2004 by Ken Ray