MS-WTF2k

Last week i took delivery of a spanking new Seagate 250 gigabyte (232 gibibyte) hard drive. Friday i undertook the task of transplanting my Windows 2000 installation to it. The system had been sprawled across 5 FAT32 volumes for a long time, and i was well ready to be done with juggling act.

One thing that i had to contend with, was the fact that i had Win2k living on F: rather than the usual C:. After boinking with it a bit, i managed to break it. So i decided that this would be a good time to make a fresh start. So—after a transient install to one of the old drives, to get a working environment that knew how to handle drives larger than 128GiB (which requires Service Pack 3 or later, and setting a flag in the registry). I formatted the new drive as one 232GiB NTFS volume, installed Win2kPro+SP4 on it, and have been slowly building the system back (minus the things that i don't use anymore, anyway).

One of the more basically stupid things that i've discovered (which, of course, was not evident under FAT32—which does not support per-user access control) is that—unlike what i'm accustomed to with unixoid operating systems—Administrator does not have full access to everything. As Administrator i can grant any user access to any file; but it seems very weird to need to. I'd already discovered, a couple of weeks ago, that there is no way to aquire admin privileges, without changing the whole user context (including home folder and HKEY_CURRENT_USER), other than belonging to the Administrators group. So i've resigned myself to being stuck with that less than ideal security situation.

Win2k acts differently when running on NTFS—beyond the expected. For Example, under C:\Documents and Settings\ (an absurdly long folder name, that i've long wished that i could change to something short and sweet, like "users"), where i used to have:

Administrator\
All Users\
BSP\

i now have:

Administrator\
Administrator.THETASIGMA\
All Users\
All Users.WINNT\
BSP\
BSP.THETASIGMA\

WTF? I can see if it wanted the system name on the user folders (though i don't see the need—nor did Win2k, when i was running it on a FAT32 volume); but why both ways? And where did it pull ".WINNT" from? The machine was *never* named that! Sure, it's the name of the core OS; but can i put things in there that will magically apply to all WinNT users, the world over? Of course not!

I'm running MS-WTF2k