Drive Mappings

This is a rather obscure question I hope someone can answer.

I'm trying to determine where in the Windows registry Windows 98, 2000 and XP store information for drive letter paths. *crosses fingers* Hopefully, in the same place for all 3.

For instance, if I partition a hard drive into two partitions Windows makes the first position letter C by default. It then makes the second partition letter D.

However, using the Windows Disk Management service you can change the drive letter D to any available letter from E to Z.

I'm trying to figure out where in the registry this information is stored.

 

Don’t know about Win9x but 2K/XP it’s
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices

Win98 does not permanently store drive letter assignments as it will remap them on every boot and assign them in a predetermined order. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q51978

WinNT remembers previously mounted devices, but will map them the same as 9x if there are none in its memory, however that will only natively happen on first install on a clean hard drive.

With 9x yes, but it’s not always the case with WinNT.

Why do you want to find the drive letter assignments in Windows? If it’s because you want to change the original drive letter of a WinNT install then it can’t be done. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/223188/EN-US/

 

I'm writing a VB app for a WinXP BartPE boot CD that will find the user profiles on a non-active system and load them into it's registry for manipulation. I wanted to track down where each user profile is along with where the system's temp folders are located.

From what you've described, I think it'll be easier to just get the profile path and probe each writable drive to find it. Since very few people know how to change their Environ paths it would probably be overkill to try and program this added functionality anyway.

Thanks for the info though it comes in handy.

 

Don't know if you are aware of this
http://regeditpe.sourceforge.net
but this is the BartPE plugin I use for that job.