My Documents direction to Mapped Drive - intermittent

[Frazer]

Clients XP SP3

DCs 2003 (not R2)

 

Im trying to get a test user to have their My Documents redirected to H:

The reason for this, rather than UNC, is that ive read some programs (Adobe Premiere in particular) work better with a drive letter rather than UNC.

 

When the user logs in, I get an error in event logs "Failed to perform redirection...the system cannot find the specified path" which I think is happening because the drive is not being mapped before the rediction happens, sometimes (the drive is mapped in my computer when fully logged in)

 

Updating the Shell Folders in registry after logon doesnt actually redirect the My Documents live (guessing it would work after another logon but thats no good).

 

Any ideas how to prioritise the mapped drive before the redirection or a workaround?

[SkreeM1980]

How do you map the H: drive, is it the home drive in the AD account? or do you have another logon script that processes this? If it is the home drive in AD and no other script is deleting/re-creating at logon it should process before the redirection.

[ccp]

Agree with Skree, if you specify the 'home' drive in their AD account, this will attach before the profile has loaded. Also you might want to consider enforcing documents redirection via group policy.

[Frazer]

H: is specified in the AD account for their home drive, pointing to \\server\users\students\intakeyear\username, this maps fine and works as a drive.

My Documents is currently redirecting to the UNC path via group policy - this works fine.

 

However, im still having the problem on my test user, H: not being mapped/ready when the redirection of my documents (via group policy) to H: takes place during logon.

You say that it should already be prioritised before that and should work - is there anything that could be slowing it down or interferring?

There is a logon script that maps some other drives, but it doesnt touch H:.

 

The only other option I can think of is to replace all the Default User's with a 'my documents' thats already set to H:\, turning off the redirect and wiping all the exisiting local user profiles from pcs/laptops

[Bruce123]

We map home drives using the path in the account and redirect My Documents to H:\system\my documents (the subfolder is irrelevant), and the drive always maps quickly enough. How did you direct My Documents to network drive in GPE? When I last tried it it wouldn't let me specify a network drive, only UNC (but that was Windows 2000 GPM so I don't know if this has changed with 2003/2008), So I had to create a customer ADM template for this purpose.

 

Regarding the Shell folders in the registry; there are two keys which relate to folder redirection; UserShellFolders and ShellFolders. I think it's the latter that is read once when you first logon and contains env variables; these are then expanded and written values in ShellFolder. In fact with true polices there is another key under "policies".

 

I am not sure that changing the registry in Default User on each machine would help but even if it does, you'd need to give all your users a new profile? If this is the route you go down and you use roaming profiles, you don't need to change default user on each PC, just save a a copy to a folder called "Default User" to the netlogon share on your DCs and new users will pick it up from there (you may need to tweak it slightly to flag it as a roaming profile first).

 

The ADM template I use actually changes the UserShellFolder directly (unlike a policy), so this could be why it works for us. I can send you a copy if you want. In fact with this, it may not matter if H drive is mapped and it still redirects, only allowing users to use My Documents when H drive becomes available.

 

Thanks,

 

Bruce.