USB Memory Sticks- Drive Letters

[Trigger]

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:

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

 

[Trigger]

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

 

[Trigger]

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