This original message was posted sometime ago, I am reply/posting with this so if anyone else is having the same problem like me they will find the answer in this thread. Please see below.
I tried to make my life easier with INSTANCE_HOME as described in http://www.zope.org/Members/4am/instancehome. All seems to work fine. But Zope displays the following error on startup: 2001-02-13T09:41:49 ERROR(200) ZServer Cannot write PID file.
After some searching I know what happend. I _moved_ the whole var directory to my INSTANCE_HOME so zope couldn't write the pcgi.pid to the disappeared var directory anymore.
So I propose to mention the fact in your the How-To that at least a empty var directory has to remain in the original zope installation.
This note applies to Zope 2.3.0 (and possibly to former versions too) on a NT4SP6us machine.
Greetings, Greg
P.S.: Sorry about my emglish. It's not my mother tongue!
this is not true on linux where debian installation uses INSTANCE_HOME to put the var directory and other things such as the new installed products in /var/lib/zope and the code (without another var directory) in /usr/lib/zope, but the last zope package is for zope 2.2.4.
Although this does work using the .deb zope package I have not being able to get it to work on a install of the .tgz binary and I gave up trying to run multiple instances in different /instance-?/var/ directories with the .deb package when I tried due to this problem. Currently I need a /usr/local/zope/2.5.1/var directory for my zope instance to start so zope has somewhere to put pcgi.pid and pcgi.soc, with out this otherwise empty "var" directory I get the "ZServer Cannot write PID file" error. I have looked into this more and found that the Zope.cgi has all the paths hard coded in it, I assume this is form the install.sh when first run. I have deleted Zope.cgi since I'm not using cgi and it has solved my problems. It would be useful for this to be noted somewhere so newbies (and not so newbies) get a warning about it. thanks and have a great day. Steve Your Solutions Ltd.