Installing Windows 2000 Drive Letters

  • Thread starter Thread starter Timothy
  • Start date Start date
T

Timothy

Hello,


I am trying to install Windows 2000 Server, the hard disk is at the
moment blank and unused. This server is going to be a terminal
services server and because of this I need Windows installed on the M
drive, ie M:\Winnt. I do not want to have any other drives like C:.
Going through setup I can not assign the drive letter M and Windows
default is the C: drive. How is this done Please can anyone advise me?
Thanks in advance.


Timothy.
 
It would be a hell of work.

Create thirteen (?) partitions, the last one should be M:, and install OS.
Delete twelve partitions, resize and convert M: partition to primary, fix
MBR, boot record, loader and the boot.ini files. You can clone M: partition
and save some time.
Another approach is a registry editing. Advanced registry editors such as
Norton one have Replace function, and you can quickly change all the
incursions of C: on M: after the regular setup. You can do it manually
indeed.

Keep in mind you'll must change any installation path disk letter (C: by
default) during applications setup on the Terminal Services server as such.

Let's wait and see who'll ask "Why do you need that?" :o)
 
Jetro said:
It would be a hell of work.

Create thirteen (?) partitions, the last one should be M:, and
install OS. Delete twelve partitions, resize and convert M: partition
to primary, fix MBR, boot record, loader and the boot.ini files. You
can clone M: partition and save some time.
Another approach is a registry editing. Advanced registry editors
such as Norton one have Replace function, and you can quickly change
all the incursions of C: on M: after the regular setup. You can do it
manually indeed.

Keep in mind you'll must change any installation path disk letter (C:
by default) during applications setup on the Terminal Services server
as such.

Let's wait and see who'll ask "Why do you need that?" :o)
Click to expand...

OK - I'll bite. "Why do you need that?"
(I was gonna ask anyway) :-D
 
Timothy said:
Hello,


I am trying to install Windows 2000 Server, the hard disk is at the
moment blank and unused. This server is going to be a terminal
services server and because of this I need Windows installed on the M
drive, ie M:\Winnt. I do not want to have any other drives like C:.
Going through setup I can not assign the drive letter M and Windows
default is the C: drive. How is this done Please can anyone advise me?
Thanks in advance.


Timothy.
Click to expand...

The answer:

How To Restore the System/Boot Drive Letter in Windows

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;223188

And some useful supplemental info:

How Windows 2000 Assigns, Reserves, and Stores Drive Letters

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;234048

--

Mike Brown
Asset Forwarding Corp.
EPA-compliant Electronics Recycling
DoD 5220.22-M Data Elimination
http://www.assetforwarding.com
 
Oh, BTW: I hope Timothy won't install Exchange on this box because the
letter M(ail) is occupied.
 
Apparently this article should be re-written in more plain and layman
language.

It was quite surprised reading it at a glance - it's seemed too good to be
true and contradicted all the experience - until I found the warning (sorry,
I follow all the Murphy's laws :) which clearly states "Do not use the
procedure that is described in this article to change a drive on a computer
where the drive letter has not changed. If you do so, you may not be able to
start your operating system. Follow the procedure that is described in this
article only to recover from a drive letter change, not to change an
existing computer drive to something else." This warning must be printed in
bold and largest point!

I change the C: letter on XP box as described and after restart and logon
attempt the nice warning popped up: "A problem is preventing Windows from
accurately checking the license for this computer. ERROR 0x80090006."
All-hackers mentor Jerold Schulman explains: "This problem is the result of
the hardware ID on the restored installation being different from the
hardware hash calculated for the current hardware. To resolve this problem,
perform an in-place upgrade of Windows XP and reactivate the Windows XP
license." Thank you very much, I was thinking, but I don't want no silly
in-place upgrades and quickly returned the letter C: (maybe I deleted the
value completely). As expected, the system's been shaken but didn't raise a
brow and came to life.

Next victim was W2k installation just for redundancy. It wasn't interesting
already: after the first reboot I got infamous warning "No paging file" so
it involved registry editing at HKLM\SYSTEM\CCS\Control\Session
Manager\Memory Management, REG_MULTI_SIZE "PagingFiles", and after that
logon got in the dead loop without any warning as predicted. I gave up.
 
The article title used to be "How To Change the System/Boot Drive Letter in
Windows" I at least got them to change that.

--
Regards,

Dave Patrick ....Please no email replies - reply in newsgroup.
Microsoft Certified Professional
Microsoft MVP [Windows]
http://www.microsoft.com/protect

:
| Apparently this article should be re-written in more plain and layman
| language.
|
| It was quite surprised reading it at a glance - it's seemed too good to
be
| true and contradicted all the experience - until I found the warning
(sorry,
| I follow all the Murphy's laws :) which clearly states "Do not use the
| procedure that is described in this article to change a drive on a
computer
| where the drive letter has not changed. If you do so, you may not be able
to
| start your operating system. Follow the procedure that is described in
this
| article only to recover from a drive letter change, not to change an
| existing computer drive to something else." This warning must be printed
in
| bold and largest point!
|
| I change the C: letter on XP box as described and after restart and logon
| attempt the nice warning popped up: "A problem is preventing Windows from
| accurately checking the license for this computer. ERROR 0x80090006."
| All-hackers mentor Jerold Schulman explains: "This problem is the result
of
| the hardware ID on the restored installation being different from the
| hardware hash calculated for the current hardware. To resolve this
problem,
| perform an in-place upgrade of Windows XP and reactivate the Windows XP
| license." Thank you very much, I was thinking, but I don't want no silly
| in-place upgrades and quickly returned the letter C: (maybe I deleted the
| value completely). As expected, the system's been shaken but didn't raise
a
| brow and came to life.
|
| Next victim was W2k installation just for redundancy. It wasn't
interesting
| already: after the first reboot I got infamous warning "No paging file" so
| it involved registry editing at HKLM\SYSTEM\CCS\Control\Session
| Manager\Memory Management, REG_MULTI_SIZE "PagingFiles", and after that
| logon got in the dead loop without any warning as predicted. I gave up.
|
|
 
Hey,

Will I need / would like to do this because we did have Citrix
installed before moving to windows terminal services and when using
citrix it installs it all on the M drive and there is no C drive at
all. When we moved users over on the same box to terminal services all
there programs and everything is setup to access apps from the M drive
which is why I wanted to keep to this setting. Does anyone know if
this is still the standard thing to do setting up terminal services
servers as M drive or is it just C drive now? Thanks for your help so
far. Timothy.
 
you can get around that issue by changing the path in the registry to this
key
Change from:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current
Version\Winlogon\Userinit:Reg_SZ:C:\WINNT\system32\userinit.exe
Change to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current
Version\Winlogon\Userinit:Reg_SZ:userinit.exe
there is more information in this article
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;249321&sd=tech

This is common after gohsting a drive or upgrading from a smaller drive to
another larger one. I would recomend making the change before switching
drive letters so you don't need to mess around with network conections. also
i think this article will shed some light on it too.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;223188
you should be able to piece the stuff together and get it working.

An alternative to this hassle might be to just install the os on a small
partition then do a rename the drive letter of the second partition to the
one he wan'ts to use (m:\) then you should be able to do another install to
that drive and because of the way 2000/xp asigns drive letters it should
continue to se the drive as m:\ or whatever you use. you might need to
modify the boot ini to bot to it. I'm not sure why he would need to have the
boot drive letter as m: though. there should be another way around it like
mounting the filesystem as another drive letter. I'm pretty sure windows
2000/xp lets you do this. I know it can be done in linux but i forget the
way to do it in windows. M aybe there is somethign with dynamic disks that
would allow it? i dunno
 
My point is that the KB article 223188 might mislead and as I see, it does
mislead.
BTW, I've never been having any problem with cloned drives/partitions.
 
i see your point and second it.

the cloned drives and changing the drive letter are basically the same
issue. I mentioned it because others would read your post and probably be in
some sort of trouble when reading it. i figured it would be the best place
for a reply when it comes up.

it would be interesting to find if there are any other solutions to those
problems.
 
jazz said:
An alternative to this hassle might be to just install the os on a small
partition then do a rename the drive letter of the second partition to the
one he wan'ts to use (m:\) then you should be able to do another install to
that drive and because of the way 2000/xp asigns drive letters it should
continue to se the drive as m:\ or whatever you use. you might need to
modify the boot ini to bot to it. I'm not sure why he would need to have the
boot drive letter as m: though. there should be another way around it like
mounting the filesystem as another drive letter. I'm pretty sure windows
2000/xp lets you do this. I know it can be done in linux but i forget the
way to do it in windows. M aybe there is somethign with dynamic disks that
would allow it? i dunno
Click to expand...

The SUBST command could save the OP quite a bit of trouble here.
SUBST /?
Click to expand...

Associates a path with a drive letter.

SUBST [drive1: [drive2:]path]
SUBST drive1: /D

drive1: Specifies a virtual drive to which you want to assign a
path.
[drive2:]path Specifies a physical drive and path you want to assign to
a virtual drive.
/D Deletes a substituted (virtual) drive.

Type SUBST with no parameters to display a list of current virtual drives.


So...

SUBST M: C:\

But I'm not sure how this would react to registry entries, etc. which point
to C:

--

Mike Brown
Asset Forwarding Corp.
EPA-compliant Electronics Recycling
DoD 5220.22-M Data Elimination
http://www.assetforwarding.com
 
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