Fixes for WinXP Ignoring Novell Disk Mapping? 121
Arcidius asks: "It's been a year and still nobody seems to have a real solution for getting USB devices to work under Windows XP in an Novell environment. If you're running Windows XP and Novell servers (NetWare 6 for us), Windows XP will show all drives available, even though usually many are have been drive mapped. When you plug in an external hard drive or USB device, Windows maps it to the first free drive letter, usually F:, but since Novell has mapped it already, you can't access the drive. The fix so far has been to manually remap the memory key to a free letter, such as B:, and this has to be done on every machine. Either that, or switch your first mapped drive, which is more of a problem in most environments. Since Novell can't figure out a solution, (and Microsoft obviously doesn't care), I throw it to Slashdot. Does anyone have a real, network wide solution?"
Software that might help you (Score:3, Informative)
Windows Admin Tricks and Tips [intelliadmin.com]
www.intelliadmin.com
Write a login script. (Score:1)
Create a global login script which runs for all users, check out the map root function in particular.
You can do all sorts of things with a global login script and other tweaks on a per-user basis. (We have scripts which ensure current versions of various software are installed on user machines, checks versions of the Novell client based on the client OS, etc.
Not a problem with Novell (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not a problem with Novell (Score:1)
Now in the case of Novell, what I have learned is that if you map from the end of the alphabet back (say, start your mapped drives at Z and work back) you avoid the collisions.
I still don't understand why anyone would use Netware unless they were forced to test with it though...
Re:Not a problem with Novell (Score:2)
Re:Not a problem with Novell (Score:2)
These devices are often unplugged, moved around, put in different computers, etc., and I've never once seen anything worse than one of my DVD burners getting it's drive letter changed when I temporarily installed an IDE hard drive and moved the DVD burner to slave (small case + cable-select).
Even between two Windows instal
Re:Not a problem with Novell (Score:2)
Re:Not a problem with Novell (Score:2)
I am also in a windows only enviroment
Re:Not a problem with Novell (Score:1)
I have a computer. The hard drives partitions are C, L, M, and K. The CDs are S (real) and V (virtual).
I can access these drives over the network from any computer in the house using the same drive letter, at least the ones I have mapped.
If you start installing drives and let them go wherever you want, you will end up
Re:Not a problem with Novell (Score:3, Insightful)
Something like S: for global shares, T: for team shares, P: for personal network storage, O: for organizational forms and memos.
Just come up with something that makes sense within your company.
BTW, when I build a PC at home, the first thing I do is move the drives around. I move the CD/DVD to Z: and my USB hard drive to U:.
Re:Not a problem with Novell (Score:2)
That's all well and good if you're in a mostly-centralized organisation. The problem can come, however, when there are different departments each with their own servers in additional to the central ones.
It'
Re:Not a problem with Novell (Score:2)
Still, since they have a Novell backend, that isn't going to help this guy.
Re:Not a problem with Novell (Score:2)
A: Yeah, I still have one, not sure if it works.
B: Never used a computer that actually had a B:
C: BOOT
D: Scratch
E: CD
F: Storage (Internal)
G: Removeable External Firewire
H: Daemon
I: Daemon
I could see anot
Re:Not a problem with Novell (Score:1, Funny)
*sigh* Kids....
Re:Not a problem with Novell (Score:1)
I don't care if he is AC, give the poster a point!
Re:Not a problem with Novell (Score:2)
Re:Not a problem with Novell (Score:2)
When a user plugs in a USB drive, in some cases Windows will try to take a drive letter from a mapped network drive and fail. This is documented in a KB entry at MS, but without a solution.
Admins can use diskmgmt.msc to assign another drive letter, but normal users or even power users are not allowed to use the disk management console.
I have not found a solution to this problem, and MS
And here is the MS KB article (Score:4, Informative)
New drive or mapped network drive not available in Windows Explorer [microsoft.com]:
Re:And here is the MS KB article (Score:2)
I didnt say it was a good one, but that will work. refresh your view and you will get your usb device to show.
Re:And here is the MS KB article (Score:1)
Re:And here is the MS KB article (Score:2)
Many reasons:
Re:Not a problem with Novell (Score:1)
It happens here with our Nikon cameras. We plug them in to the USB port, and they show up as a removable drive. But F: is taken up by our networked drives (Windows XP network), and all of a sudden the camera quits showing up right.
This also happens with network drives (Score:1)
However, once the network drive comes back, you won't be able to reach it until you remove the flash memory.
It's not just Novell (Score:4, Informative)
It happens with any mapped drive. If you map a drive as the next avalible letter then plug in a USB device it will do the same thing.
Re:It's not just Novell (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It's not just Novell (Score:1)
Ancient Joke (Score:1)
Doctor: Don't use Netware like that.
-Peter
Re:Ancient Joke (Score:1)
Re:Ancient Joke (Score:1)
According to the Census Bureau the population is a little under 300M [census.gov]. The math shows $1127.74 per person in the US. If we reckon that 1/3 of people in the US don't pay taxes (I think this is a conservative guess given that children, homemakers, prisoners, and persons who are paid "off the books" don't pay tax) puts the per-taxpayer bill at about $1700.
I make a decent living, but I certainly don't live a lavish lifestyle that allows me to shrug off an expenditure o
Re:Ancient Joke (Score:1)
I would like to see a lot more transparency in the way that money is handled, just to see how much pork there really is. For every dollar spent on a given task, how much is spend on $1,000+/night hotel rooms for contractors, etc.
I shot from the hip with my reply taking your sig literally.
-cg
Answer (Score:1, Flamebait)
Do you want a pony too? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Do you want a pony too? (Score:5, Informative)
This covers installs with or without ZEN.
+mod parent up - not a troll, he actually offered helpful info! Using a carefully crafted
Re:Do you want a pony too? (Score:2)
-matthew
Re:Do you want a pony too? (Score:2)
Two of the programs required client reinstalls in order to use the new drive letters so it quickly became a pain in the ass. The re
Re:Do you want a pony too? (Score:2)
Why would the software be "keyed" to the drive letter? What kind of software design is that?
Re:Do you want a pony too? (Score:1)
But this is where the phrase "reality bites" comes from.
Re:Do you want a pony too? (Score:2)
But as the other poster replied, it is a stupid design. It happens though. And the instructions actualy suggest installing to a mapped drive instead of using unc names or ip numbers. I mostly ru
Re:Do you want a pony too? (Score:2)
I'm all for MS bashing, but only when it's in line. This is a PEBKAC plain and simple.
Re:Do you want a pony too? (Score:2)
I guess in a way, if you cannot use a certain drive leter or device it might be scenes as thier fault.
Re:Do you want a pony too? (Score:2)
Please, slow down, spell check, and proof read!
Re:Do you want a pony too? (Score:2)
Microsoft OLE (Score:2)
As someone else said: reality bites.
We don't really want to tell the users to convert to UNC either. One particular E: drive on our network has been hosted over the years by no less than five different servers. If we keep the drive mapping = E:, the old document links still work.
We do have a new CIO who may
Re:Microsoft OLE (Score:2)
We don't really want to tell the users to convert to UNC either. One particular E: drive on our network has been hosted over the years by no less than five different servers. If we keep the drive mapping = E:, the old document links still work.
We do have a new CIO who may mandate that we change the drive letters in use. That's fine. If all the document linking breaks, and we can blame him instead of taking the blame ourselves, it should let us change the infrastructure to accommodate MS's pissing on our en
Re:Microsoft OLE (Score:2)
"Don't do that" isn't exactly a helpful answer - and my job is to help my users.
Drive letter mappings are a good thing: how many tough problems in computer
Re:Microsoft OLE (Score:2)
Drive letter mappings are a good thing: how many tough problems in computer science are solved by Yet Another Level Of Redirection? This is one of them.
Drive letter mapping isn't the problem. The problem is not having a good way to remap things if the drive letter changes. Most decent applications can deal with that. You simply tell it where to find the data that it needs. It's not a hardcoded driveletter. If you're using Excel or Word, you can update links to the new driveletter.
Re:Microsoft OLE (Score:2)
Re:Do you want a pony too? (Score:2)
HOw in the world does changing drive mapping require a client reinstall?
-matthew
Re:Do you want a pony too? (Score:2)
Map Network Shares Backwards (Score:2, Insightful)
seems to function fine in my network.
Re:Map Network Shares Backwards (Score:2)
Change the mapping! (Score:3, Informative)
-matthew
Re:Change the mapping! (Score:2)
Re:Change the mapping! (Score:1)
-matthew
Re:Change the mapping! (Score:1)
Re:Change the mapping! (Score:1)
No offense, but I have met many people who reject the simple solution for no good reason. Possibly because they are afraid of trying to fix the overly complex mess they've created over the years of being a poor (group of) admin.
"The fix so far has been to manually remap the memory key to a free letter, such as B:, and this has to be done on every machine. Eithe
Re:Change the mapping! (Score:1)
Re:Change the mapping! (Score:1)
Re:Change the mapping! (Score:2)
I understand that applications can depend on specific drive mappings. Not just custom software. But we are not talking about just any drive mapping. We are talking about F: in particular which maps to teh SYS volume. Do your applications specifically depend on F:? Why?
Anyway, I'm sorry that you work in an environment where making trivial changes is an uphill battle
Re:Change the mapping! (Score:2)
Yes, I think the question is a decent one for an Ask /.
I've got the same problem - and I'd like to know if someone found a way to keep MS Windows from pissing on my users. It appears that the answer is: no.
Could I change the drive mappings for 2,000 users to accommodate the 100 power users that bring in USB sticks or hook up digital cameras? Sure I could. Would another 100 of them be pissed because a
Re:Change the mapping! (Score:2)
My point is that we are not talking about just any old drive mapping. We are talking about the F: (SYS volume) drive in particular which, on modern systems, serves no useful purpose to your average user. It certainly shou
Re:Change the mapping! (Score:2)
It would be painful to do, but yes we could move things around. Probably will someday.
Where drive letter mapping is a good thing is in creating relative links. If the document contains a link to E:, then it really doesn't matter if we (IT) ran out of disk space on Server1, a
Re:Change the mapping! (Score:2)
You (or someone) mapped a user network drive to E:!!!??? Brilliant work. First, fire that person if they still work there. Then continue your search for a USB device hack. I had assumed that it was F: that was getting in the way (which can be changed without affecting users).
Re:Change the mapping! (Score:2)
Back when Windows 3 only needed a C: drive (this is before CD-ROMs), it was a fine setup. Even after CD-ROM drives became popular, the only conflicts with E: were the occasional Zip Drive users.
Really, the removable drive problem only became a problem within the last year. Since most of the people who have these kinds of devices are tech-savvy anyway, they solved the problem themselve
Dont you PAY for the privelege... (Score:2)
Isn't that the advantage of proprietary software over, say, gnu/linux?
Thats what the marketroids tell us anyway...
Foolishness aside; I suspect it is possible to create a filter device below the USB storage device which starts drive mapping from z and works down (for a knee jerk) or which reads currently mapped drives from explorer's context and starts there.
This would require significantly more knowledge of that crufty beast the registry than I h
Re:Dont you PAY for the privelege... (Score:2)
You can actualy mimic this exact same situation by formating it on a computer that only has one hardrive and cdrom then trying to access the same device in a computer with two hardrive and cdroms. My suggesti
Re:Dont you PAY for the privelege... (Score:2, Informative)
Drive letters are assigned by the OS, period. Neither NTFS or FAT has any idea what drive letters they are, or in fact any concept of drive letters.
Letters are assigned, under Windows, by simply picking the first one as the drives are enumerated in their fairly random order. However, if a device has a 'serial number', which most USB ones do, you can assign it a specific drive letter in the console, and Windows will remember it.
Sometimes you will
Re:Dont you PAY for the privelege... (Score:2)
I never said NTFS or Fat had any idea of the drive letter asignment. If that was the case then windows 98 would be the same as NT/2000/XP. The Logical disk manager in NT style operating systems have the ability to do this. This is can be done several ways, With a logical Drive, The drive letter
Re:Dont you PAY for the privelege... (Score:2)
I didn't say anything about volume serial numbers. I said volume id. They are not derived from time stamps or when the drive is formated either so i guess your looking in the w
Re:Dont you PAY for the privelege... (Score:2)
Yes there is. And i'm surprised that you are so adamently looking in the wrong place. This has nothing to do with formating or partitioning of a drive it has to do with XP. Actualy XP places it there almost everytime is accesses a new drive(drive it hadn't previously accessed).
flashback! (Score:1)
Unless im misunderstanding the problem, just change your drive maps to be higher than say, G:, and you should be fine!
Re:flashback! (Score:2, Flamebait)
Windows 3.x had no part in it. DOS first mapped primary partitions across all hard drives to available drive letters, then did secondary partitions. Add a second hard disk and its primary partition(s) got squeezed into the middle of your alphabet. Either figure out how to reconfigure your programs or reinstall them. What fun!
I can't believe Microsoft is still mucking about with drive letters. It's 2006, FFS!
Re:flashback! (Score:2)
Re:flashback! (Score:1)
Re:flashback! (Score:2)
sneakernet and Novell being used together - why? (Score:3, Insightful)
The best you can do now is have a central repository (e.g. file server) set up ahead of time, and mounted on both machines. Then you do the copy twice, and the file ends up taking up space on 3 disks instead of 2. Or email it, which is similar but less secure (it has to be set up in advance, and the file takes up space as files on 2 machines, plus a mail attachment, until you delete one or more of the copies). Or mount one machine's drive on the other (but that is usually some hassle and only works on the local network).
But because of admins, and paranoid security policies, we can't do easy ad-hoc file exchange. So we use USB keys or floppies or SD cards or CD-ROMs or whatever. And some admins can get paranoid about that, too.
Re:sneakernet and Novell being used together - why (Score:1)
But he must still be able to get patches d/l from update sites onto the corporate network.
Thus the sneaker net.
Gah? (Score:1, Offtopic)
Much better. And I can even share it over NFS
Tom
Re:Gah? (Score:2)
Persistence is key (Score:1)
Use Diskpart, Possibly in conjuction with WMI (Score:2)
Correct me if I am wrong... (Score:2)
SUBST (Score:1)
subst the usb drive's letter to a local directory before inserting the usb drive, then insert the drive. one masks the other.
I have the same problem w/o Novell (Score:1, Redundant)
I've never been motivated enough to go looking for a fix.
As someone else pointed out... (Score:2)
Fix My Key (Score:1)
WinXP Mounting (Score:1)
Re:WinXP Mounting (Score:2)
Time for new coke bottles? It's "hidden" in plain sight the disk administrator. Just teasing, just look more closely at the disk admin next time you're in there. You can add a drive letter, but you can also use an NTFS folder as the mount point.
Re:People still use Netware? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:People still use Netware? (Score:2)
Re:People still use Netware? (Score:1)
Re:People still use Netware? (Score:2)
Unless you mean IT staff training, its all backend so it shouldn't require any training outside IT. That is as easy as retiring the old netware guys (except one to assist in the transition) and hiring starving linux gurus to replace them. True the *nix
Re: (Score:2)
Re:People still use Netware? (Score:2)
I use Samba and I like Samba. If the scope of your task is a small office with 10 users, one fileserver and one printserver then Samba is a fine choice.
I don't think I'd try to set up a clustered san-based fileserver environment using it. I probably could but some of the range of software components I'd have to use are pretty sketchy. When you want "enterprise" filesharing, Netware has it all in one place with refined management GUIs.
Re:People still use Netware? (Score:2)
Don't be so narrow minded.
Re:People still use Netware? (Score:3, Insightful)
The real problem is that forever we have mapped the E: drive to the Everyone folder. For a decade or more, our user's have been using Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) to connect a spreadsheet pie chart into a word processing file. Guess what happens when yo
Re: (Score:2)
Re:People still use Netware? (Score:2)
Doesn't seem a genuine question to me. To ask 'why' and then state a position that something else is better smacks of flamebait. Nor did it to even attempt to address the question asked in artic
Re:People still use Netware? (Score:2, Interesting)
Sharing your data among Windows, Linux/BSD and Mac users while maintaining the proper user and group permissions under Linux can be a pain.
Netware is a decent server OS and never bombs out for us. There's a setup within our organization trying what you suggest. You can basically DoS the whole thing by copying a large file from one volume to another through NFS.
Re:People still use Netware? (Score:3, Informative)
It can break, of course, just as much as any OS can, but generally once you get it stable it just runs. I've seen NetWare boxes run for years without a reboot - in corporate environments, supporting users and printers, doing their job.
Have you got a box you haven't done a OS reload or recompile on in seven years? I do. It's NetWare 4.11. It sits quietly in the corner and serves files. It's fairly secure, as it runs IPX making it