Error Message: There is no disk in the drive. Please insert a disk in

I don't have to risk scratching old hard to find next to impossible to replace disks.

I use a CD/DVD burning program to create an .iso image file of such discs then when I need it can use that file to burn a new exact copy of the original without needing to have the original at hand. Most Linux Operating System downloads are .iso format, quite useful for creating an exact copy of the original.

I apologize for not getting back to you all about this issue. Although I did not use mohavepc's solution, his post and others' posts led me to a solution:

I changed the CD drive's name from E: to F: when I installed the software, since the program was always looking for the disk in E:. Then I changed it back to E:.

I copied each disk (which were not installable) to a flashdrive F:. That worked.

I went one step further so I wouldn't even have to use the flashdrive.

I set up a small partition on my harddrive and named it F: I then copied the entire contents of the flashdrive to the partition.

Now when I run the program, it automatically looks for drive F: and finds it, and I can run the program entirely from the hard drive. It runs faster and more efficiently than having to swap disks in an out of the C: drive.

mhs asked why I couldn't take the CD out and insert the next - I could have, but that's the whole problem I was trying to solve, not having to swap disks in and out while I was running the problem. Had it been an install, it would have been easy, but the program being so old, it had no clue that I had 8gb of RAM and a 1 TB hard drive.

Thanks everyone for contributing. I appreciate the conversation. And I'm about to post another problem with another very old program, so watch for it.


Carl

that's the whole problem I was trying to solve, not having to swap disks in and out

That's a whole lot of the reason for programmers to put their software on a DVD, holds up to about 7 times as much as a CD.