jcmorris@mwunix.mitre.org (Joe Morris) (10/17/90)
We've been tearing (what's left of) our hair out over the inability of Microsoft's Windows versions of PowerPoint and Word (among others) to permit installation on Bernoulli drives. If you specify a Bernoulli drive letter you get the utterly useless message "Unable to create directory" (even if you specify the root!). There are two situations where the product must be installed to other than a fixed disk: either it's too big (and PowerPoint takes more disk space than some mainframe systems I once ran), or the user is on a classified system which cannot contain a non-removable disk. Last night I found the solution: run the IOmega utility program 'rcd' to set the lock option for the target drive before starting the install. It apparently works fine: I've tested it with both programs on both 8" and 5-1/4" Bernoulli units. (Just remember to use 'rcd' to unlock the drive after the install.) A big rasberry to whoever in Microsoft wrote the installation program and without documenting it at all wrote in the restriction that the program would not accept a mountable disk as the destination. An even bigger rasberry to whoever decided to use that obscenely misleading error message. It's almost as if the programmer had never heard of removable hard disks like the Bernoulli. This seems to be a second cousin to the problem with Windows 3 setup where if you select the 'Set Up Applications' function it offers to search "all drives". Bull...the drives it offers is the set of drive letters represented in the PATH variable at entry to Windows. Since this usually excludes the floppy drives (which doesn't bother me) and the Bernoulli drives (which does) it's somewhat misleading to call the resulting set of drive letters by the term "all drives". If someone can point me to a place where this behavior is documented I'll be glad to retract the complaint...but I think I've looked everywhere it might be. Joe Morris