I've recently had to develop some software which can fail gracefully in low disk space conditions. Luckily the S60 Emulator allows you to mimic low disk space conditions. You can find the process how to alter the emulator described here.

Normally the emulator uses a directory within it's installation location to simulate the C drive on the phone. This works well, however the phone always reports that it has the same number of bytes free as your installation drive. Briefly my emulated phone thinks it's got 60 gigs of free disk space! To simulate low disk space conditions you need to tell the emulator to use an alternative real life PC drive as it's C drive. This way we can assign a memory key, or a virtual drive like those created by TrueCrypt as the emulators C drive. We can fill this drive up with useless data to make the emulator believe it's running on a device with only a few kilobytes free.

To instruct the emulator to use another drive you simply need to insert the following line into your epoc.ini file. The epoc.ini file can be found in the \epoc32\data directory within the installation location of the emulator.


So I created my TrueCrypt drive, and following the instructions on the Symbian web page I copied over the necessary files. The I tried to start the emulator. Result: Nothing! The emulator would not start. I checked the epocwind.out file (it's in your Windows temp directory) and found the following final line:

     0.305    Thread WSERV.EXE::Wserv Panic SCDV 12

How odd I thought, perhaps I missed file when I created the fake C drive. So I spent most of yesterday checking and double checking files, searching the internet, Symbian and Forum Nokia for help, not to mention trying different drive letters and so on. The most annoying thing was, I'd had this working 4 weeks ago, and now the emulator did not seem to want to “play ball”.

Five minutes ago I stumbled upon my mistake. If I change the line from


to


With a small 'x' it works!!

Talk about an annoying bug – the drive letter is case sensitive, upper case drive letters don't work! All that wasted time, simply because the emulators documentation, and indeed the Symbian FAQ, failed to point out it was case sensitive. In fact the FAQ by using a capital letter almost suggests that you should use those.

Anyway, talk about frustration!! So I'm posting my woes here, in the hope that if any other poor soul, or indeed me in the future, gets stuck with the same issue that a search on the internet might stumble upon this page, and save some one all the heart ache.  

Affected SDK:
Nokia S60 3rd Edition MR (Maintenance Release).