How can this be accomplished? This is an extension of my post below about Syskey. I'm trying to store it non-locally, but it will only search for media in drive letter A: I don't have an A: drive on my new computer... it starts with C:, and C-F are my SD card slots. F: is the one I'd like to change to A:, if possible. Then I'm convinced I could store the syskey on an SD card. I don't think it needs to be a floppy at all... just that it must reside on drive letter A: I'd greatly appreciate any help.
I could be wrong about this, but if I remember correctly, on XP you couldn't assign a hard drive or optical drive to A or B. I see that I can do it on Windows 7, but I think on XP I couldn't use the first two letters. Then again, it may have been that when I used XP my motherboard supported a floppy drive. Maybe it would let you if the board doesn't have a floppy controller.
I just found out how to accomplish it actually. I tested it out on another machine here on XP also with a card reader instead of a floppy drive. What you have to do is go into Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management. In there you simply right click on the drive you want to change, in this case F:... go to "change drive letter", or something, and pick the one you want from a dropdown box (in this case "A"). And that's that... simple. Both Logical Disk Manager services & DCom must be enabled. I also enabled both Com+ services for good measure, but don't know if it was vital. I looked in My Computer and saw that the SD card reader drive was now being identified as a Floppy Drive (A). And sure enough, you can store a syskey on an SD card now and use it this way as if it were a floppy. Strange thing though... when you insert the card and click "OK" upon boot, it didn't read it correctly the first time. And I was thinking... figures, it didn't work. But I clicked OK again a 2'nd time and, voila... it worked! So I dunno if it takes 1 try for it to initialize/identify it, or what. But it seems the 2'nd time's a charm. And when creating the Syskey it did it to me too. The first time I tried to store the Syskey on the card it said it failed. But I retried, then it worked. So just a heads up to anyone else that may try this... don't give up if it says it fails the first time. Give it a 2'nd try. And let me know in here if this happens to anyone else too. So... mission accomplished. It can be done. I'm now storing my Syskey non-locally on an SD card here on XP.
I just ran into one side effect, which I've remedied. Upon starting programs in Sandboxie I was getting this error message: Windows - No Disk Exception Processing Message c0000013 Parameters 75b6bf7c4 75b6bf7c 75b6bf7c So I did a search and found this post in Sandboxies forum: http://www.sandboxie.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=6934 Tzuk addressed the issue... placing the drives in File Access > Blocked Access does indeed remedy the problem. You need to do this for each sandbox. So yeah... everything's up and running the way I want now.
BTW, assigning drive letters manually like that is useful if you want a predictable letter for certain drives. For instance, I make my optical drive something near the end of the alphabet, and my backup drive a letter somewhere in the middle. Then when it gets disconnected and connected again, it will have the same letter you assigned instead of taking the first available one. I also reassign my hard drives because they haven't lined up the way I wanted. I actually have an issue with my optical drive where if it's enabled, I get DPC latency spikes for some reason. So I only enable it when needed to rip or write a disc.
I learned how to do this a couple years ago. Sometimes my PC would switch the D and C drive letters after i formatted it and i had to Google it.
