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"Drive Not Ready Reading Drive A:" Printing
DocumentID: 652476
Revision Date: 29-Feb-96 8:29:16 PM

The information in this document applies to:
WordPerfect® 5.1 for DOS

Problem

Drive Not Ready Reading Drive A: while printing a document.

Answer:

The document had been retrieved from a diskette, and while printing the document the diskette had been exchanged in the drive for another diskette.

Details:

This is caused by a combination of DOS and memory cache. Temporary print files are written to the current directory (where the file was retrieved from). In this case a temporary print file will be written to the floppy. The job is not written immediately to the floppy, and because temporary print files are cached files, the file is kept in cache until the print job gets under way. During the print job WP needs cache so the temporary print file may get moved to the disk at that point. If the floppy is changed in the middle of this process, DOS will write the updated directory information on the new floppy. This happens because the file size is not known until the file is closed. This could happen at any point during the print job when cache fills up, so the user must wait until the printing is complete, to guarantee that the files are completely written back to the original disk before inserting the next disk.


Corel does not wish to disable cache for floppies because that would be extremely slow for dual floppy users. To not cache the temporary print file, would slow down almost all print jobs, which is also undesirable. Obviously, the best thing to do is to keep the floppy in the drive until the job is finished. Another option may be to include the following statement in the autoexec.bat, which will redirect the temporary print file to the hard drive.
SET WP=/PF-C:\


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