Things I am still trying to do in my UA XP install disc

[pdmcmahon]

Hi all, I have been at the unattended process for about 2 years now, I am constantly learning new ways of doing things and certianly making progress. However, a few things still elude me, hopefully some of you can help me here. I need help with the following remaining items:

Change my DVD ROM drive letters from D: and E: to Y: and Z: (personal preference, I like them at the end of the drive letter chain).

Set Daemon Tools as one drive letter, and change it's drive letter assignment to X:, additionally, enable all options (so that the taskbar icon is green).

Also, I unclutter the Start Menu, so that Communications, Entertainment Games and System Tools are out of Accessories and directly under Start \ Programs. Is there any way to force new shortcuts for System Tools to always go to Start \ Programs \ System Tools instead of into Accessories \ System Tools?

Rename my Local Area Connection to On Board LAN Card and enable the option to show in systray when connected.

Thanks in advance

[nitro322]

Change my DVD ROM drive letters from D: and E: to Y: and Z: (personal preference, I like them at the end of the drive letter chain).

I do something similar with my flash card reader. It adds four 'drives' to Windows explorer, but the only one I ever use is the SD reader, so I disable the other three and reassign the SD reader to the next drive available. The following method works for me, but there may very well be an easier method.

I have a line in the GUIRunOnce sectino of my winnt.sif that calls a batch file to run a bunch of commands post-installation:

[GuiRunOnce]
	"a:\postsettings.cmd"

Then, in the postsettings.cmd file I have a line to call diskpart.exe, which is a command line interface to Windows' disk management utility:

start /wait %systemroot%\system32\diskpart.exe /s a:\diskpart.txt

This command instructs diskpart to run in script mode, using the commands specified in a:\diskpart.txt. I have the following commands in diskpart.txt to remove the unusued drives and reassign my drive letters:

rem diskpart script to delete unused USB card reader "drives"
rem reassign CD-ROM drive letter to E:, and SD drive letter to F:
select volume 3
remove letter=e
select volume 4
remove letter=f
select volume 6
remove letter=h
select volume 5
assign letter=f
select volume 0
assign letter=e

You'll need to play around with diskpart on your system to make sure you get the proper volume numbers and drive letters. To get started, run 'diskpart' in cmd.exe, then enter the 'list volume' command to see your current volumes and letter assignments.

Like I said, they're very likely an easier way to do it, but this method does work for me.

Rename my Local Area Connection to On Board LAN Card and enable the option to show in systray when connected.

This should be doable through winnt.sif, but I have had only marginal success in getting it to work correctly. I can get it working, but then on the next reinstall it seems to have broken again. I don't know what the deal is. If you'd like to try yourself, look in the winnt.sif help file under the network section. Here's a snippet from my file:

[NetAdapters]
	Adapter1 = params.Adapter1
	Adapter2 = params.Adapter2

[params.Adapter1]
	ConnectionName = "3com 3cr990"
;   INFID = "pci\ven_10b7&dev_9903&subsys_990310b7"
	INFID = "PCI\VEN_10b7&DEV_9903"

[params.Adapter2]
	ConnectionName = "Intel 82559"
;   INFID = "pci\ven_8086&dev_1229&subsys_10428086"
	INFID = "PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_1229"

You'll need your PCI device ID, which you can find through Device Manager. As I said, that's supposed to work, but I can't get it to work reliably.

Don't know about displaying the icon by default. If anyone else knows, please post. I'd certainly like to know how to do this as well.

[pdmcmahon]

At the very least, you have set me in a positive direction, thank you for the posting.

The catch on the NICs is that they are all different across the 11 computers that I have at home. That Vendor ID is the hill that I cannot seem to get over. I have tried everything from the WINNT.sif to a VBS file to a batch, nothing seems to be consistent.

The Start Menu folder structure is just a personal preference. I don't like them being grouped together like that. I know there are some of the HIVESYS files located in i386, I have seen references in there about the Games folder and some others, but I have either been too afraid to mod them or too lazy to research them. I have a million other things going on, so it isn't THAT important, but it bugs me that I cannot figure it out. I basically want Windows to STOP automatically assigning to those default folders and do what IIIIIII want it to do. We can tweak this OS so much, but there are still things we cannot force it to do.

[No6]

Change my DVD ROM drive letters from D: and E: to Y: and Z: (personal preference, I like them at the end

I use a modified script that a fellow from France posted a while ago. It allows remapping of any drive but you can extract the optical drive handling out of it and modify to suit.

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=18087

[Takeshi]

Also, I unclutter the Start Menu, so that Communications, Entertainment Games and System Tools are out of Accessories and directly under Start \ Programs. Is there any way to force new shortcuts for System Tools to always go to Start \ Programs \ System Tools instead of into Accessories \ System Tools?

They're just folders and shortcuts (lnk) and you could try moving them at the end of setup with a script to you desired location and deleting the original. This would be simpler than modifying the default hiv.

Normally these are in All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Accessories.

Just suggestions...

Edited September 5, 2006 by Takeshi

[pdmcmahon]

True, and that is what I currently do, but if Windows Media Player goes off and recreates all of it's own shortcuts, then it messes up the whole thing and I have to have a local login script that runs on every login that keeps them tidy. I would rather fix this issue in the underlying code before the OS is ever installed.

Thanks for the tip though. I have been doing that in my runonce batch file for well over a year now.

[Takeshi]

I'm not convinced that modifying HIVESYS will stop WMP or some other programs from rewriting to the All programs menu.

[pdmcmahon]

Let me explain.

I am not saying that it won't. I just don't want it to create subfolders under Accessories, I want them all to be under to top level of Start \ Programs. It can create a shortcut under Entertainment all day long, I just don't want it to create a shortcut under Accessories \ Entertainment

Does that make more sense?