Disk Administrator Stops When Zip Drive is Present

• Microsoft Windows NT Server version 4.0
• Microsoft Windows NT Workstation version 4.0

SYMPTOMS

When entering Disk Administrator, Dr. Watson appears and notes that there has been an error in the application and that it will be closed. This occurs when a zip drive is present and while the progress bar titled "Disk Administrator is Initializing" is present.

CAUSE

A zip drive is the only (or first) device on the SCSI controller with the lowest base I/O address, making it the controller that is queried first by Disk Administrator. The failure occurs only if there is not a disk in the zip drive. Otherwise, the media will be properly reported as Drive 0, with its size and appropriate logical drive letter.

RESOLUTION

There are a few solutions:

• Always insert a disk into the zip drive before launching Disk Administrator.
• Connect the zip drive to the SCSI controller that the system's hard disk drives are connected to and remove the secondary controller.
• If possible, set the I/O address of the secondary controller to be higher (in hexadecimal) than the address of the controller with the system's hard disk drive(s).

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in Windows NT version 4.0. We are researching this problem and will post new information here as it becomes available.

MORE INFORMATION

This occurs when two SCSI controllers are present in a system. PCI-based SCSI controllers are given very high I/O addresses (such as FC00 - FCFF), so any additional ISA or EISA SCSI controller present in the system will have the lower address. When Disk Administrator cannot find the media for this first device, an error occurs.