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Boot Camp keeps creating an 'F' drive in XP

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XP under duress

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 14, 2010
7
0
I have loaded XP with boot camp on about 20 IMAC's over the last 6 months at my work. Everything has gone fine until about 1 month ago. When finished instaaling the Mac drivers and when rebooted, in XP, boot camp creates not only the 'C' drive labelled "Boot Camp", but also creates and mounts permemently a 'F' drive on the Windows computer. The 'F' drive is no longer mapable on the XP. I can't have an 'F' drive because other softwatre on the XP need to map a 'F' drive.
Why is it creating an 'F' drive and how do I get it to stop, like the other 20 installs that went fine.

Thanks - anyone with ideas.

Some details, - yes the Windows partition is very large, usually 500gb
No, I keep it from connecting to the internet - some one said that might be the reason.
 
'F' drive problem

Thank you for the idea, I will go into work today and check to see. If I understand corrrectly, your thinking that XP is mounting the Mac partition to access the drives (or something like this) as the 'F' drive, as opposed to putting the drivers in the Windows XP partition (C drive) ?
 
XP under duress said:
XP is mounting the Mac partition to access the drives (or something like this)
Click to expand...

Just this. The Boot Camp 3.x drivers are installed on C:, but are giving you access to the Mac OS partition as whatever drive letter it feels like. It it takes F: before your other need does, you are sunk.

In Vista/7 it's pretty straightforward to change drive letter assignments, but I can't recall how to do it in XP.

B
 
I agree. I'm using Windows 7 and I have drives C (BOOTCAMP), D (DVD RW) and E (which I labeled "OS X" when I set it up the partitions on the OS X side)
 
XP create 'F' drive

yep - that is it. XP is opening the MAC partition on the 'f' drive. Thanks Balamw and Baby MAc. And yes, the older installations on the other 20 machines are with BootCamp 2.0 and the new ones are 3.0 - so is there anyway to NOT have 3.0 open the MAC partition, and just put the drivers on the 'C' drive like 2.0. Is there some benefit to having the Mac partition open. Other than the obvious, it lets you move files back and forth. In my case I don't want employees moving files to the MAC.

Thanks again
 
XP under duress said:
Other than the obvious, it lets you move files back and forth. In my case I don't want employees moving files to the MAC.
Click to expand...
It's read only access. They can only read files from the Mac partition and cannot make any changes without additional software.

There was a support article about how to disable it, as it was getting in the way of some XP SP3 installs. Let me see if I can find it.

EDIT: Here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3841

B
 
Xp creating F drive

Thank you - I'm going to give it a try to disable the Apple read feature.

Also, I'm in the process of mapping the F drive to another Server before I install the Apple drivers, right after I finished the Windows install. Unfortunately without the Apple drivers I can't access a Wireless Network Connection because the wireless adapter is not installed, so I'm going to hook it up with Ethernet and see if I can tie nto another server and map the F drive to the server before I load Apple drivers. Maybe this will force Apple to move to the G drive. Lets hope. Will post this afternoon when I finish.

Thanks again, this is a termendous help.
 
Windows XP will always map to the first free drive letter. You can permanently change the Mac partition drive assignment using computer management console; compmgmt.msc. You can re-map it to Z:, so it won't conflict with future drive mapping. You can use management console to connect to all twenty machines and change the drive mappings remotely; as long as you have admin rights or an id/pw with admin rights.

compmgmt.msc \\computername1

Scripting
Do you use a login script? You can add the following batch to check if the mac partition is assigned to F, and then unassign. If you don't have a login script, you can add a script to startup, or create a launch script for your new app. Drive mappings can be done on the fly.

If file exists f:\systems
net use f: /d
net use f: \\*map your new drive*
else
net use f: \\*map your new drive*
end if
 
XP under duress said:
Unfortunately without the Apple drivers I can't access a Wireless Network Connection because the wireless adapter is not installed, so I'm going to hook it up with Ethernet and see if I can tie nto another server and map the F drive to the server before I load Apple drivers.
Click to expand...

This disables only the Mac HFS+ driver, and should have no effect on your ability to connect to the network. So you could leave it off if you just don't want your folks accessing the Mac side.

ctyhntr's approach is the right one, but I have had XP change its mind about what drive letters to assign to what before. It works much cleaner/reliably in Vista/7.

B
 
Xp creating F drive

Thank you both Balamw and Ctyhntr.

Both ideas worked great! I'm not a Windows person but now I know how to remove a drive that doesn't show up in the 'map drives' pull down menu.
Also the link to Apple giving the file name that enables XP to read Mac files was great. I renamed the file and it worked well. When I rebooted, no 'F' drive, only the 'C' and everything seems to be working.

Thank you both again for the quick response and great help.
 
xp creating F drive

Heah, can you tell me if Boot Camp 3.0 works with Windows 7. I'm going to try to convince old time boss to leave XP and move to Windows 7. Only reason they use Windows is b/c we are running AutoCAD and it only runs in Windows envirnoment. Boss loves XP, will he hate Windows 7. Is W7 any good?
 
XP under duress said:
Heah, can you tell me if Boot Camp 3.0 works with Windows 7. I'm going to try to convince old time boss to leave XP and move to Windows 7. Only reason they use Windows is b/c we are running AutoCAD and it only runs in Windows envirnoment. Boss loves XP, will he hate Windows 7. Is W7 any good?
Click to expand...

I LOVE Windows 7. I'm my opinion, it's a major improvement over XP, for a security standpoint alone, as well as being much more memory efficient over Vista. I use Windows 7 as my primary OS on my MacBook Pro and I couldn't be happier.

Boot Camp 3.0 will work with Windows 7. I think the latest Boot Camp drivers are 3.1, correct? I don't think Windows XP is worth sticking with. It's a 9 year old OS which, even being a fan of Windows for a long time, I can no longer trust to keep safe and secure. Also, I find it's horribly inefficient to navigate. Windows 7 navigates very much like Leopard/Snow Leopard does in with the sidebar in Explorer and Start Menu Search.

If you have Windows 7 Professional, that comes with a license for Windows XP that you can run in a virtual machine for older, incompatible applications that you can run as if it were native to Windows 7.
 
Grannyville7989 said:
Windows 7 navigates very much like Leopard/Snow Leopard does in with the sidebar in Explorer and Start Menu Search.
Click to expand...
I agree with everything Grannyville7989 says, but want to point out two things:

1. Because of the above W7 is different enough from XP to effectively be as alien to a long time XP user than Mac OS.

2. If your AutoCAD licenses are up to date (2010 or 2011), you will find they work a lot better on W7 64 bit. If they are as old as your XP licenses you may actually be better off sticking with XP.

B
 
xp creating F drive

Yes AutoCAD licenses are 2011 and we are running 2011. I need to check the Imacs to see if they are 32 or 64 bit.
Thanks much
 
I am running Windows 7 on Boot Camp. I would not say that 7 is all that different than XP. OS X is different and being a long-time Windows sufferer, I'm sticking with 7.

If you are getting the 7 upgrade, then try copying your XP's "WINDOWS" directory to the Boot Camp drive before installing 7. If you have the full 7, you don't need to have XP previously installed.
 
Those methods assume that you either got Win7 installed successfully or got through the install program to the upgrade/custom page. In my case, I could not get that far, because the Win7 install DVD could not find a previous version of Windows. Even swapping in my academic retail XP CD was not accepted as a valid copy to upgrade from. But installing XP on an external drive (even though the install terminated after the first reboot) and copying what it did write (the WINDOWS directory without all the drivers for attached hardware) to the Boot Camp partition allowed my upgrade DVD of Win7 to install, through the upgrade/custom page and beyond. It's reasonable to assume that copying your current WINDOWS directory without doing 'an install to an external drive' should work.
 
Baby Mac said:
In my case, I could not get that far, because the Win7 install DVD could not find a previous version of Windows.
Click to expand...

Then you didn't follow the methods.

The fact that you go this far, implies that you were able to install from the media provided, but entered your product key.

Windows 7 (and Vista) only know that they are supposed to look for a previous version because you told them to by entering an upgrade product key. If you do not enter a product key they assume you have a full license and enter a 30 day trial mode.

The easiest method is #3 which then just does an upgrade over the full trial version you just installed.

B
 
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