Resolved Windows 7 Network home folder issue

I'm an IT Tech in a school. We have 8 identical Toshiba Sat Pro laptops running OEM Windows 7 Pro. as far as I am aware these are now set up identically. However, recently two of laptops have been refusing to allow access to hidden homefolders. Logged on as an Admin myself for instance I can see my document folders but they have a greyed out cross against them and will not open when clicked. For our students they don't even get that far - the machines refuse to accept there is a hidden network homefolder.

I have found that running delprof2 then carrying out a gpupdate / force then logging the student on twice has resolved the issue (temporarily I suspect) on one laptop but all my efforts on the other fail.

 

Try running the following from an elevated command prompt (and if necessary in safe mode)

Code:

ATTRIB -H  "C:\Users\Path\To\Folder\*" /S /D

This should unhide the hidden folder and its contents. Hopefully, you should then be able to reset the folder permissions.

 

Thanks Don.

Ended up installing an EES licensed version of Windows 7 Pro as the issue seems to be related to the bundled software the manufacturer added to the OEM version. Testing tomorrow to see if that is indeed the issue. I'm finding that it's much easier to put a clean Windows 7 install on new kit rather than spend hours removing add ons and applying updates that have occurred since the machines were built.

What I really need to learn is how to build an image - there is a lot of info out there but from my reading so far nothing that explains it with the clarity my aging little grey cells need!

 

Easy. Assuming the laptops are identical, do your clean install on one and then do all the updates and patches you require to it. Once you have the first one finished, you then clone the drive. You can use Acronis True Image for this (yes its a paid program but its my preferred choice) or you can use Clonezilla which is free. There are numerous other options - both paid and free which you can research or get other advice on. There are also plenty tutorials on youtube if you're not familiar with how its done. Acronis is so easy to use, it'd be harder to get it wrong!! With Acronis, you can use the supplied Boot Disk or create one from within the program, on each laptop and get the image from a networked drive / folder.

When you've cloned the drives, you shouldn't need to update the windows product key on each machine since you're using a Volume License and i'm assuming that you get one product key which covers all your license entitlements. If your License involves multiple keys, then you change them from the Control Panel > System screen. I cloned a 160 Gb drive the other day in about 15 mins using the Acronis boot disk. Of course, a lot will also depend on your network speed / bandwidth but, in any event, its a pretty painlesss process.

 

Thanks Don - greatly appreciated.

 

You're welcome.