Hello! I have a laptop that has been puzzling me for some months now. What it is annoying is that whatever device I assign to the letter E:\ won't show up on MyComputer (but I can access it by typing E:\ on the address bar). Every other letter behaves just fine. Equally when ever I create a new user all the data related user folders (like the desktop, documents, music etc) will be created under D:\ letter or not at all. I even had to insert a thumb drive with letter D:\ assigned to it, just to get the folders created and then manually revert them to the default location C:\Users\Username. Initially this laptop had a data partition assigned to letter D:\ but I merged it with C:\. This laptop was a University laptop that was bought up by my girlfriend after the end of her studies and has apparently a lot of customization. I would just format the hell out of it but it is MAK activated meaning I won't be able to activate it again legally. The version is Seven x64 Enterprise. Anyone has a clue as to how to revert this customization? Thank you!
In my opinion, you should just reinstall Windows and activate it, it's not that big of a deal But if not, you can try running an sfc /scannow
Maybe it 's starting to tell you exactly what a computer it is. And also what do those C:\ D:\ and E:\ mean in real life, are they a separate disks or some kind other devices or are they partitions on the same disk? And what partitions and/or drives are there at all. Is there also some other devices plugged on and You trying then changes these letters? It would also be good to know a little about the Windows that is installed, what exactly it is, when it is installed, whether it has been regularly updated, or at least what the latest updates were, and so on. At the moment, it is quite difficult to understand what the problem really is.
In my opinion, just reformat it and don't care about activation. Use updated Windows 7 Professional / Ultimate SP1+ with OEM Retail activation project to see how it goes. In 90% cases are these "company" laptops activated without any problems.
It is not possible to reactivate in legal way since it is MAK activated. The sfc /scannow command probably won't show errors since this is just precustomized deployed image. Those things were meant to be like that by what ever brain did it. C:\ D:\ and F:\ are partitions on the first drive. On E:\ I have tried assigning the dvd drive, the main partition of an external hard drive and a partition of the internal hard drive. What ever I put under drive letter E:\ won't show up in explorer and will be accessible manually through typing E:\ in the address bar. My guess is that there is some setting in the registry that defines this behavior. The laptop is a Toshiba Tecra R10 with Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit. Updated with simplix something like 3 months ago the latest. It detects updates just fine ofc using the bypass. Thank you George I will try this one. I was thinking also trying to repair the drive using the upgrade feature. I hope that it won't mess up with the activation but I have cloned the drive just in case. I am trying to preserve the MAK activation here. Otherwise I have already installed Enterprise as dualboot and activated with KMS. The online activation doesn't work on this one obviously. I have also trying to save the activation status with an application that I found here (Token Activation Something..) but it didn't work (due to the Serial being hidden in registry?).
The laptop is a Tecra R10 S4401. It shipped originally with Vista Business and upgraded later on to Seven Enterprise once my girlfriend was graduated. I consider this more as a learning project than anything else. Thank you for the links to the gp and registry. Other than that I have already installed KMS activated Enterprise as dualboot. (Originally I tried to see if I can activate online which failed) Bingo! In HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer the dword nodrives where present with decimal value = 16 which corresponds to drive E:\ Thank you @Tito ! Now lets see if someone can point out the setting that creates the data user folders on drive D: by default instead of the user folders in C:\Users\Username
@xrononautis The installed BIOS is indeed the latest one, but it looks like there's some kind of loader installed that emulates an old ASUS SLIC 2.0 table. It is possible to track it down and remove it, but do you really want to devote the time? Regarding the user account anomaly, it does look weird. Is there any kind of hard link or junction present among those files and folders?
Messing with the Bios is not something for me to do at the moment. I lack a lot of knowledge in this area. I will rather keep it there for the time being and comeback to it at a later point (or never ) I am familiar with the registry though and this knowledge is more useful to me as I can apply it in other computers as well. One thing that I found out following the suggested relevant articles from the one that you linked and exploring different registry locations that were mentioned was that the registry key HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx\Software\Microsoft\CurrentVersion\Explorer had two REG_SZ entries named Shell Folders and User Shell Folders = D: I would consider it a suspect to the anomaly as you called it as those entries are not present on my other windows installations that were clean installs. I am itching to delete them and see what happens