Desktop Shortcuts Don't Work

[kevrob1]

I've got a problem with my desktop shortcuts for my burner, cd-rom, and floppy. My shortcut for my 2nd hard drive works fine. When I try to access one of the afore mentioned drives, XP says that they don't work and trys to point me to other folders to fix the shortcuts. I can access the drives in disk management, and in explorer as well as in powerdesk pro. I'm wondering what the problem could be. I reformatted the first partition with the os on it and the problem persists.

The only thing I can think of is that I was trying to make a back up copy of my Win98 SE disc and it's pretty scratched up so it wouldn't copy properly and after that things went awry for the shortcuts. Any ideas?

I running Win XP Pro on a P4 2.26GHz machine with 512 of pc2700 ram. I use Nero to burn with.

Thanks.:t

[Zakalwe]

I don't know how much you know, so forgive me if this seems too obvious: Have you checked the properties for the shortcuts?

To check the shortcuts are pointing to the correct place do this:

Right click on offending shortcut
From context menu which appears, choose "properties"

In "Shortcut" tab on the dialog box which appears, check the "Target" field. For you CDROM it should be something like "E:\"
(without the double quotes of course, and substitute the correct drive letter)

Do this for all of them.



Another approach would be to simply delete them, and recreate them.

To recreate them, open My Computer, size the window so that you can see at least some of the desktop.
Next, right click and drag on the drive you want a shortcut to, and drag to the desktop.
When you release the mouse button, you should get a little menu which allows you to create a shortcut. Click on that and "viola", you should have a shiny new shortcut on the desktop.

:p

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Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, still exists

[kevrob1]

Well this is strange, whenever I make a shortcut to my desktop for one of my drives I usually right-click it in my computer and it says it can't make it here do I want it on the desktop. Since this problem popped up that hasn't worked. I just dragged the icon from my computer to the desktop and took the "create shortcut here" option and now the icon works... strange. I'll try it for the cd-rom and burner and see if that solves the problem.:t

[Johnny Fist]

Hey, whatever works.

And you're not using 98SE on that monolith of a computer, are you?

[kevrob1]

Zakalwe, no offense taken, I tried those things and in properties all was well. The floppy even lit up before telling me it wouldn't work. I tried everything I know and nothing worked until I dragged it to the desktop and got the options I mention above. You know, copy here, move here, and create a shortcut here. I really think that somehow all the recent MS patches has something to do with it but that could just be paranoia...:t

[kevrob1]

Monolith? I'll have you know that a year and a half ago this baby was a paragon of computing avant gardnessness... I wouldn't think of using Win98 and tell anybody about it...:D

[Zakalwe]

I wonder if maybe what you're seeing is an example of XP being too smart for it's own good - ie, when you had read problems on the burner, XP decided that the drive was "unavailable", and maybe flagged that against the shortcut as well. After it recovered from the drive errors, it may somehow have neglected to "unflag" the shortcut. Hence a new shortcut working ok...

I dunno, all this is pure speculation, but I have seen some odd behaviour relating to CDROMs, particularly burners, with my own XP machine.

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Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, still exists

[kevrob1]

I don't know but the drag and drop to the desktop while wholely successful with the floppy didn't do so well with the cd-rom, or the burner. I had to have media in those drives for it to work and then I can't open the tray from the right click menu without media in the drive. It's a minor pain but still it never happened before.:t