I always had this issue with grabber when i use it from an NTFS partition and was a limited user in winXP, the problem was that it would save the datafile. when you try to save it crash when trying to write. I been experimenting lately and found that if you make a virtual drive and run grabber from it it works just fine. you can copy the bacth script below and try it, if you also have this problem.

:: grabber-glue
:: change "c:\allegtools" to the dir where you have grabber
subst g: "c:\allegtools"
g:\grabber.exe
subst g: /d

this seems to work for some reason or the other. I wish I know why????

Sorry to hear about the problem. Do crashes happen with other write operations (with Allegro apps, of course)?

nah, I have used the pack file functions in some other programs, and it works great. the bug only happens with grabber, and the dat tool. the problem seems to be located around the NTFS and admin accounts, example

if i am a limited user using an NTFS partition = not working
but if i am admin then it works

if i am a limited user using an FAT32 partition = working
whenever i am admin or not

its weird and the only solution i found was creating a fake drive, which windows sees as a FAT32 volume. go figure.

Perhaps grabber doesn't take into account it might not have the rights to write to a file.

yes perhaps, but the thing that gets at me is that if the partition is FAT32 and you are not admin then it does work. does that mean that in winxp the FAT32 partition are secure-less?.

FAT32 has no premissions, only a read-only flag (and a system flag, but I don't know if that makes any difference)

perhaps you should own that dir yourself or something

I run as an administrator all the time. Some day i will only be a power user

oh i do have write and read to the dir, i have tried the Shared Documents folder, all users can read/write to that unless you change it. I have tried the root of the drive ie. C:\, I have try on my own desktop by moving grabber and grabber.txt and try doing it, still nothing it seems grabber and the dat utility are trying to access something in the HD where they don't have permission, also this only happens when I try to save only. if the datafile is already made it loads just fine, and when i try to save it again it give me an alert dlg saying "Oh, Dear error writring file.dat". so I am guessing it has to do something with the type of filesystem i am using, because of the FAT32 and NTFS deal.

edit: by the way BAF you know you should be admin all the time, is like trying to play CS after 8 beers, its tends to mess things up. talk about windows security.

flares, I have 2 questions: Which Allegro version is the grabber compiled with (# and regular/debugged), and if the debug version (or if not, build the debug library), could you run a backtrace on exit() (or otherwise determine the point of crash)? It would definitely help.

sure i'll try that, how come i didn't think of that before.