I can't believe what a
total idiot I am. After installing 3.51.61, I mounted all 3 previously formatted Great Quality discs and ejected them without any problem, decided to format another blank GQ disc as a dry run before trying to format a Memorex disc again. Well, after successfully formatting (which only takes about 15 seconds, BTW) the GQ disc, this version has a new dialog on the first eject of a disc which tells you it needs to write track & session information before ejecting and once I clicked OK the progress bar went to about 5% and I got another BSOD, this time the BAD_POOL_CALLER error. When I went to reformat the same disc, I finally saw what my mind had been blanking out all along -
the little message about disc label restrictions. The part about being limited to 11 characters had registered before, but I had just looked
right past the part about spaces not being permitted. Naturally, I had put a space in the label of *
every* disc I had formatted (not using spaces is just
so DOS). For some reason, the GQ discs didn't seem to mind this, while the Memorex discs choked on the space immediately. I have since changed the label names of my GQ discs to remove the spaces and I have been able to format a Memorex disc successfully, though I still had one BSOD during the *pre-eject track & session info write* after formatting once with a corrected label name. It seems to work best if you format a disc twice before ejecting or using it - I even seem to remember there being a message about *format again* in the format dialog of one or more prior versions. From my limited experience to date, it looks like the BSOD's
may be avoidable by formatting twice before using or ejecting media. FWIW, confession being allegedly good for the soul.
So, gimme my sign:
ESO (
Equipment
Smarter than
Operator).