I have a rather peculiar issue with a Win2K Pro workstation on our domain. This workstation was not allowing users to log in. It would give a message box that “Your system has no paging file…”. When you clicked OK, the system would return to the logon box. After a little research, I discovered that the hard drive letter had been changed from C: to E: (The system only has one hard drive with a single partition, but also has the standard A: floppy and D: CD-Rom). I did some searching on MS and found two KB articles that helped resolve the issue. In KB249321, step 3 allowed logon to the machine locally but errors were still generated from services that failed to load (presumably because they too were referenced by full path to C:\…), and I found an entries in HKLM\System\MountedDevices\DosDevices\C: and DosDevices\E:) After renaming Key DosDevices\E: to DosDevices\C: as per KB223188, the PC booted normally without any further errors logged.
My question is what would cause the drive letter to be changed? At the apparent “ground zero” of the issue, I see some peculiar events logged in the System event log. First, there are the standard 6009 and 6005 information events from EventLog indicative of a boot up. Then the weird ones start. I first see an error from Distributed Link Tracking with EventID 12507, description as follows:
The volume ID for C: has been reset, since it was a duplicate of that on E:. This volume ID is used by Distributed Link Tracking to automatically repair file links, such as Shell Shortcuts and OLE links, when for some reason those links become broken.
Then I see information event 12506 also from Distributed Link Tracking:
Ownership of the volume ID for E: has been successfully claimed. This volume ID is used by Distributed Link Tracking to automatically repair file links, such as Shell Shortcuts and OLE links, when for some reason those links become broken.