Das Virtual CD Supportforum

Changing Drive Letters

I have found that installing the latest version of Zone Labe Security Suite causes some issues with Virtual CD. The version of ZASS installed is 6.5.700.000. The issue is that same with Virtual CD V7 or V8. I set the Virtual drive letters to Z or Z & Y and then reboot the system. When I log in the drive letters have changed to N and O and and USB devices are then listed with the next drive letter e.g. P The USB drive was originally drive O. I noticed the issue when my backup started failing. I see that there were some issues reported some time ago but I did not see any suitable solution.

Drive letters shift

Indeed this strange phenomenon has been rarely observed before with different Virtual CD versions. Unfortunately we don't see any reason for this and thus we don't have a solution at the moment. I presume that this problem is not caused by Virtual CD, but for any reason by the OS.
Please use the Virtual CD Drive Editor to change the drive letters for your virtual drives. In order to change the drive letters for your other devices, please use the disk management. Does this problem also occur if you assign a fixed drive letter to your USB drive?
A possible workaround may be a VBScript (which uses the Virtual CD API) to set the drives correctly after restoration. The Virtual CD API Documenation will give you more information on how to do this (or just let me know if you need some assistence).
Maybe the diagnostics output (Virtual CD Toolbox -> Show diagnostics) from the status before (with correctly set drive letters) and after a reboot will give us an idea what's going on.

Drive letters shift

Where do I send the diagnostic information you suggested in your reply?

My gut feel on this is that there is a timing issue and this causes the OS to see the disks attached to the system in a different way - I have looked and indeed ZASS V6.1.* does not have this issue whereas ZASS V6.5.* does. I note that on my system V6.5 does take considerably longer before I am able to do anything. (I can "create" the problem at will by changing verions of ZASS)

No matter what I set the drive letter to during a session on a system reboot they will have changed to the "incorrect" ones. It is not possible (apart from changing versions of ZASS) to change all the drive letters correctly without a reboot as changing some does require this. I can get you the diagnostics but I would like you to tell me what you want as this is quite a time condsuming exercise.

You could always download a trial copy from Zone Labs for yourself and see if it happens on your systems?

Thanks .

Drive letters shift

Sorry, I should also have said that the USB drive is connected at boot time and does have a permamnent drive letter - at least it did until VCD's drives changed and it was shifted.

Diagnostics

You can send the diagnostics output within a new answer. It will be kept internal!

I agree with you that this may be a timing issue. I will do some testing as soon as I have some more time. I'm now in holiday for the next two weeks and I doubt that may colleagues will have some time for testing.

Anyway, the diagnostics output may give us some important information!

More Info

I have access to a friends system over the weekend which I have had few dealings with. However they run VCD and we installed the latest ZAPro V6.5 on this system and I had one hell of a job to get the system to boot after the installation and when I did I had the same issues that VCD's drive letters had changed and the system was a real pig on booting. Uninstall ZAPro V6.5 and go back to V6.1 and normality is restored. There really is an interaction between your program and ZA. I hope that you will be able to resolve it. Can you download a copy and try it on one of your systems with VCD V8 (or V7) and see if you see that same thing?

ZoneAlarm 6.5

I installed ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite 6.5 on a Windows XP SP2 test PC with Virtual CD v6 and v8. The virtual drives are set to G: to I: and O: to Q:. After a reboot the drive letters have not been changed.
I talked to our developer and he could not see any obvious reason why ZoneAlarm should affect the (virtual) drive letters. Once set they are stored in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices and read from there during startup.
Please try to set the virtual drive letters with the built-in disk management. Does this workaround the problem?
Maybe it would be a quite good idea to open an additional support call to Zone Labs. Unfortunately they do not seem to have knowledge base or a support forum, but only a support form...

Changing Drive letters

I have already tried using disk manager and the result is no different.

As this happens on two disparate systems there must be something else going on. Your product is affected and is the *only* one affected when ZApro or ZAss is installed.

There must be a reason for this and given your product appears to have a history of this issue I am more than willing to assist but I need some more ideas or you to talk to Zone Labs and investigate together what the issues is/could be.

USB drive letters

You mentioned USB devices in your first request. If I understand you correctly, the virtual drives are not the only ones which are shifted, but the USB drive is also set to another drive letter. Is this correct?
If so, it would be interesting if a HD drive letter (if you partitioned your disk) will be changed, too. (I'll understand if you don't want to try this... ;-))
I'm also quite sure that any other CD emulation software will be affected on your system, too. As I could see in your diagnostics output you have InCD installed. I presume that you have the complete Nero package installed. Nero also provides a virtual drive. Can you test this issue with the Nero virual drive?

Please understand our dilemma, that we cannot reproduce this problem. This makes it quite difficult for us to open a direct support call to Zone Labs. They will ask us questions about your system which we will not be able to answer...

OK So I have enabled Nero and indeed it too suffers with the problem. I used disk manager to set VCD to Z & Y and Nero to X & W and my USB device to P

On a reboot Nero is N & O VCD becomes P Q and the USB device is R.

So where does that leave me - you cannot reproduce ZL cannot reproduce. I can do it on two totally separate systems with no problems at all. and I can also fix it on both systems by switching back to an earlier versions of ZAss or ZApro - There has to be something that we can do together that will tell us why it is happening.

You have suffered this before and I am not the only one that has seen it.

Unless you and ZL work together on what could be the cause we are going to get nowhere which to me as a customer of both companies is unacceptable.

Support call

As you write in your last answer that ZL cannot reproduce it I guess that you already openend a support call at ZL?

First of all I'm glad to see that this problem is not due to Virtual CD as other programs and devices are affected in the same manner!
But if ZL cannot reproduce this problem, what's the cause!? Is there possibly a third software interfering? I assume that there is no way to find this out without having a closer look at your system.

Anyway I'll open a separate support call to ZL. I'll be back to you as soon as I get an answer.

Another problem with ZASS 6.5

Hi Ray,

another customer experienced performance problems related to Virtual CD v8. He found out that "two programs were conflicting which caused Virtual CD v8 not to work properly. The newest released, trial version of Zone Alarm Security Suite 6.5.722 by ZoneLabs, and RecordNOW! v7.3 by Sonic. ZASS slows down the system for some security reasons causes system to launch a program 10 to 30 seconds late and RecordNOW! labels the Virtual CD Drive as "CD ROM Drive" in the hardware management but shows it as Virtual CD DVD Drive in Windows Explorer. I removed those programs then reinstalled Virtual CD 8 and it worked very well."
I'll forward this to the ZoneLabs support.

Kind regards,

RE: Virtual CD and ZoneAlarm conflict

Hartmut, Marcus,

Apologies for this taking such a long time.

What I did was reorganise my system to make space for installing a new copy of Windows XP Pro.

I installed this in a 20Gb partition and as soon as I could I installed ZASS V6.5.737.000 and then went off to windows update and downloaded *all* the updates. I then installed Virtual CD V8 and so far so good.

So with some backups taken I then proceeded to update my system with MS Office 2003 and all those other little programs that make life easy. I have also added all the MS Office updates from Windows Update. More backups - but so far drive letter have remained stable and have not changed. I have also added all the VCD's and ISO's I had on my system.

Tonight I backed it up and installed NERO and from that point on things went wrong. After installing NERO it asks for a reboot and when the system restarted and I logged back in as Administrator - the drive letters had changed.

Like before VCD then has trouble changing and adding letters/drives and whatever you do it is back to doing what it wants rather than what I want.
E.g. Drives Y & Z become N & O after each reboot.

I restored the backup and the MBR / track 0 using Acronis True Image and now I am back in control.

Initially I did just restore the partition but this did not appear to work as drive letters still wanted to be N & O - I do not know enough about MBR and Track 0 for the partition to comment further but having restored that as I said I can now set, and keep, the drive letters I wanted.

I hope that this information will enable you to track down what is going on.
The file I used to install NERO was Nero-7.5.1.1_eng.exe which is the latest download from Ahead.

Regards

Ray

Nero causes drive letters shift

Hartmut,

What did I install with Nero? Well I thought about that and decided that I would just take the default so InCD was not installed (it is not by default) and I did not install the virtual drive. Indeed I did not even start NERO (apart from what is starts istelf after installation) There was no previous installation and it was right after the reboot at the end of the install that drive letters changed. I did nothing other than allow the NERO install to reboot the system as it requested.

I also did not allow NERO to manage *any* audio/video files I unchecked all of those options and I did not select NERO Scout to start either.

If it helps please feel free to publish the info you feel is pertinent.

Hope that helps

Regards

Ray

I can also reproduce drive letter shifts

Just built a brand-new HP system: Win XP MCE 2005, the latest demo version of VCD 8, started doing various installs, everything working fine. Then the drive letter started shifting on reboot to the first available non-floppy letter (D: in my case).

Last install was several web-related items, including ZoneAlarm (also latest version just downloaded).

So I removed ZoneAlarm, and the problem disappeared immediately. Rather disappointing, since I like ZoneAlarm, but since I have another firewall, I only use ZoneAlarm for detecting spyware anyway.

Just thought you might like more confirmation that it's ZA related. And that, for me, removing ZA fixed it instantly.

Regards

I can also reproduce drive letter shifts

Jim,

Thanks for confirming what I have thought for some time. This is especially good info as you stated it was on a completly new build of XP.

If only I could get ZL to accept that there is a problem :-(