USB Memory Sticks- Drive Letters

Trigger · 12 Apr 2006 at 21:55

Hi,

At school, pupils and staff have never been able to use their USB memory sticks correctly on our old Windows Server 2000 network with Windows XP pro clients. We are in the process of upgrading at the moment and now have Windows Server 2003 servers and Windows XP Pro clients and also have Ranger installed as before but with the addition of GateKeeper which was sold to us under the impression that it would solve our problem with pen drives.

Now our problem is that the users have H:\ set as their home drive, default open/save path etc and this in itself is no problem. We also have an Avantis CD Server which puts logical drives on the clients- D:\ E:\ and F:\ with G:\ being the local CD Drive so in theory, the USB stick would use I:\ but instead it tries to use H:\ which is already taken by the home directory. So then, the USB stick either does nothing or takes over H:\ which is then useless as the user has nowhere to save the things on their pen drive

The home directory is set in the user profile in active directory and then Ranger fiddles with things on it so this is near impossible to change the letter which the home drive uses so we need a way to force the pen drive to use avaliable letters after H:\. We've been playing around in:

HKLM\System\MountedDevices

but without much luck. One things I did think of was putting a few lines in the logon script with KiX:

Code:

USE H: \DELETE

IF InGroup("2001")
    USE H: ("\\server\home$\year11\@UserID")
ENDIF

IF InGroup("2002")
    USE H: ("\\server\home$\year10\@UserID")
ENDIF

IF InGroup("2003")
    USE H: ("\\server\home$\year9\@UserID")
ENDIF

IF InGroup("2004")
    USE H: ("\\server\home$\year8\@UserID")
ENDIF

IF InGroup("2005")
    USE H: ("\\server\home$\year7\@UserID")
ENDIF

but I'm not sure whether it will work

Sorry for the long post and we would appreciate any help

Thanks,

Ben

benjo plz. · 12 Apr 2006 at 22:00

Never had a problem with that here. Maybe change the Home drive to something else?

Trigger · 12 Apr 2006 at 22:03

Phnom_Penh said:
Never had a problem with that here. Maybe change the Home drive to something else?

We've looked at doing this but apparantly, this is very difficult to do as it is set in the user's AD profile and a lot of ranger settings point to H:\

Thanks for the suggestion though

Any more ideas?

Thanks

Ben

Vietnow · 13 Apr 2006 at 01:26

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;297694

This problem affects our stock system at work, where if usb drives are added they nick the H drive required by the application aswell.

Are they all the same model usb drives? if so plug it in then use the disk management function in windows xp to assign it a different drive letter, windows will then retain that setting going forwards. if not then i dunno :S

Trigger · 13 Apr 2006 at 08:53

Vietnow said:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;297694

This problem affects our stock system at work, where if usb drives are added they nick the H drive required by the application aswell.

Are they all the same model usb drives? if so plug it in then use the disk management function in windows xp to assign it a different drive letter, windows will then retain that setting going forwards. if not then i dunno :S

That's the problem- they will almost certainly be different model drives because we have so many users. I think we are going to have to look into changing the home drive

I think we could get away with not changing each users individual profile with a bit of KiX script to map the home directory according to group membership and then delete the connection to the server on drive H. The Ranger settings shouldn't be difficult to change as you can change an entire group at a time. I think I can then test this though with a message box and Kix's @HomeDir macro

Thanks for all the help,

Ben

bledd · 13 Apr 2006 at 16:11

microsoft reccomend starting at Z: and moving backwards..

stoofa · 13 Apr 2006 at 17:44

As far as I'm aware you've hit a bug in Windows that currently has no fix.
It has existed since release and I've really got no idea if they are ever going to fix it.
The problem is that Pen drives require a drive letter prior to network shares and if there isn't one available then they don't automatically get assigned one.

Some will take the first drive letter after all local drives regardless of what is already there.
Most will simply not get assigned a drive letter - although I believe you can manually assign one under Disk Management.

We only have this problem on laptop's - desktop machines tend to go no higher than E with local drives and our first network drive is G.
However with our Sony laptop's and their built-in Memory Stick readers and the like you can end up in the situation of there being no gap between local drives and network and then no letter gets assigned.

Please post back if you do find a fix - I've been unable to find one and although we've raised the issue directly with MS they keep on telling us we know and no, we don't know if/when it will be fixed.

BigBoy · 13 Apr 2006 at 19:50

bledd. said:
microsoft reccomend starting at Z: and moving backwards..

Re mapping the home drive as bledd said to the Z: drive letter would be the best option as far as i can see. As others have said there is no known workaround for this problem and its one i have faced recently whilst seting up AD at work