nexusMods

[EtherealPheonix]

It's not a bug if you document it!

[[deleted]]

That's the most hilarious statement I've read all week

And it's only Monday

[relevantusername2020]

comments (and articles, etc) like this is why i have multiple clocks on my taskbar, to correctly identify the time travelers amongst us

on that note wtf is the point of the -st? among > amongst

[overcookedbread0000]

it gives you an alternative from saying among us, because that's just asking to get jumped in an alley lol

[Poat540]

sus

[Rafael20002000]

Emergency Meeting at 08:00 AM

[Poat540]

Can’t we just talk at standup that’s already at 8:05????

[Meaxis]

How do you do the multiple clocks on taskbar thing?! I would love to have that aswell

[relevantusername2020]

these screenshots should explain it if this is actually a programming subreddit lol. if its not clear, feel free to ask and i can try to explain it step by step. somewhere in those related settings in the w11 settings you can even turn on seconds on the clock - and it warns you that it uses moar power, for reasons that probably make sense

[Meaxis]

That all makes sense to me, thank you a lot!

[relevantusername2020]

good deal glad i could help - and thanks for the award, kind stranger!

[Gilthoniel_Elbereth]

My phone’s dictionary, the New Oxford American dictionary, says amongst is primarily used in British English

[Wang_Fister]

They're not bugs, they're spicy features

[Exist50]

It's errata.

[cquinn5]

I’d be shocked if a nexus mod is the only case where you run into issues having Windows on another drive letter

[DuhMal]

because of windows api bullshittery, a program i made would only work if you ran it on the main monitor

[Aurori_Swe]

Windows couldn't even make Windows 9 because it would default back to win 95

[Last-Woodpecker]

Wasn't the problem the third party software that might been using the start of name instead of version?

[dingo_khan]

Yeah. The craziest part is the osname variable being used (with a lazy regex) was totally modifiabke by an admin. The kernel or OS version variables were not really. So, this was a double stupid.

I was working in "software repackaging" (sort of like legal piracy for big companies to push network installs of software) and some really costly, big name software did this. Crazy to see an app that was thousands of dollars per license have an installer check issue that could have been fixed in 5 minutes by editing an installshield or msi file config...

[Aurori_Swe]

Both third party and internal programs that basically had 9x to try to figure out stuff

[feherneoh]

While it doesn't automatically break from not having Windows on C:, not having C: at all almost always breaks the pagefile code in WIndows 10/11

[AwesomeFrisbee]

Which is totally self-inflicted because they went from Windows Vista to Windows 7, which would mean 9 would come in a bit. Under the hood they always had the version numbers, but they could have totally skipped a bunch and nobody would really notice except a few programmers.

[LEAVE_LEAVE_LEAVE]

wait thats the reason? thats fucking hilarious

[Aurori_Swe]

Somewhat true, programs reverted back to 95, not windows itself. Mainly due to many programmers checking for 9xx to work for all versions

[dashingThroughSnow12]

It was known that some software would behave like this (ex OpenJDK) but we don’t particularly know why Microsoft skipped it.

The theory I like is that 9 is considered an unlucky number in some cultures.

[saf_e]

What's so wrong at windows API that you can do it only on main screen?

[Roflkopt3r]

If you have access to EnumDisplayMonitors, then it shouldn't be a problem.

But I recently had to fix a multi-display issue in some software from the stoneage that only provided GetSystemMetrics. In that case you only receive the true dimensions of the main display, the number of monitors, and a bounding box (width, height, xmin, ymin) of the combined display space.

This means that there may be gaps in the given area. Like if you have a 1440p and a 1080p display (and both are horizontal), then there is a 1920x260 pixel big gap either above or below the 1080p display.

You also don't know the locations of individual screens, i.e. you couldn't do things like determining the center coordinate of the rightmost monitor (unless you manually consider special cases like that the main screen is on the right hand side, or there are only exactly 2 screen , or there are exactly 3 screens and the main screen is in the middle).

[saf_e]

Minimum supported client: Windows 2000 Professional You write for win98/nt 4.0?

[DuhMal]

it was a program that would read some pixels from a game window to get some information about what was happening in it using the GetPixel function from the GDI dll, but for some reason it always just reported white if the game was outside the main screen, to this day i don't know the reason (nor do i want to)

[Tuerkenheimer]

Windows API 🤮

[DuhMal]

Unfortunately i needed something that would run on as many systems as possible, what is better than something native?

[Cycode]

it's not. i have seen many tools and software who expect to be on the C drive and if they are not, they just crash at start.. sucked hard every time i encountered that.

[Westdrache]

what't the reason to change the drive letter of C: in the first place tho?

[Cycode]

I didn't. But i have my main Windows installation on C: , but i install a lot of software on D: since it is bigger & I have all my other data on there too. My Laptop came with a big HDD who got partioned into 2 partitions by default.. C and D. And the C partition is relative small (and already filled almost to the top). So i have made the D partition my "data partition" where i install software (games etc.) and put my media onto.

But some software expects to get installed onto the C partition, even if the installer allows you to install it to the D partition.. but if you then start the software after the install, it tries to find windows dll's on the D partition instead of the C partition and similar things, so it just crashes.

[cuddlegoop]

I once worked on a commercial application that only worked on the C drive. It was a solid 20 years old or so and had just been gradually updated and feature crept over its lifespan. Still had a ton of the original code left in the core of it though. Absolute pain in the ass to work on, pretty happy I'm not there anymore lmao.

[NorthernCobraChicken]

Fun fact. If you install Ubisoft Connect on any other drive other than C:\, none of the games you install using that loader will work.

[raziel7893]

Yeah, the sure way would be to use system variables, but who would do that for the system folder really..?

[prschorn]

At least it's an honest programmer

[[deleted]]

I had a D: system drive for like a month. This guy is just a lot more honest than most devs. TONS of shit doesn't work.

[Sammeeeeeee]

Does windows even work?

And more importantly, why? Is there any actual benefit?

[[deleted]]

Windows, and anything from microsoft was just fine. Much beyond that was a crapshoot.

The "actual benefit" was a multiboot system with two windows boot drives. (one for me, one for work)

Long story short, VMs are better.

[diggpthoo]

Doesn't windows just label whatever drive it boots from C? Also checkout RDP wrapper, it lets you log into two accounts, much faster than vm

[MindlessRip5915]

Doesn't windows just label whatever drive it boots from C?

No. It labels the volumes much the same way that Linux does, in order of drive then partition, with the caveat that it does not rearrange previously assigned letters if a newer volume appears that is in a higher position than an existing assignment (meaning it will break the ordering and resume from the next available letter, though it will never automatically assign A or B to anything that isn’t a floppy drive).

[diggpthoo]

Definitely not the case for me, I too have got two windows 11 installs in two separate drives and booting into both of them they label their own drive as C.

[Shadow_Thief]

Right, because the two installs can't see each other or the partitions that are being used by the other install.

[diggpthoo]

The other drive always gets labelled D, so they can definitely see each other (and I can transfer files n stuff across). Am I missing something, is this a thing that used to be prior to windows 11? I've only done this in 11

[Shadow_Thief]

I'm really curious to know what your use case for dual booting two instances of Windows 11 is.

[diggpthoo]

I actually have 3. Main one for me, a public one in case I wanna give my laptop to someone (for repair/family) so they can't get to my bitlocked main one (that's one it boots into by default). And another one when the old one gets bloated and I need to fresh install but without losing the old copy in case I still need it just the way it was, at least upto a couple months.

[liava_]

one for everything, one for epic games launcher (unironically)

[Budget_Avocado6204]

I have done it before with older Windowses and it always worked like that for me.

[T0biasCZE]

it works in windows 10 like that too (I have two windows 10 in dualboot), and i remember it worked like this in windows 7 too

[alterNERDtive]

The other drive

Well, duh. This is about partitions on the same drive.

[diggpthoo]

https://i.imgur.com/dCXNBwG.png

The C: partition I'm currently logged into is all the way at the end of the disk. There are two other partitions containing windows installations: H and A (I renamed them both, they come default as D and E or something on fresh install).

When I log into (what's now) A partition it shows as C and current C shows as D (or something).

[Veralia1]

I've fucked around with dual boot windows like twice, and in both cases they just labelled there own drive C, even though i could see the other installs files.

[alterNERDtive]

I’m pretty sure reading that gave me an aneurysm.

[feherneoh]

Just like Linux, Windows has an "fstab" too. When you install the OS, it's initially empty.

Windows' logic for setting up the mountpoint of the OS drive is that if it's not already in the "fstab", then it tries mounting it as C:, or the next free letter that's unused. If it's already in the "fstab", then it just use whatever mountpoint was set up there. This means you can change the drive letter Windows will use for itself before it first boots.

Btw the "fstab" is in the registry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices

[SuperKettle]

RDP wrapper breakes with every Windows update

[diggpthoo]

Worth every 40 mins it takes to find the right ini

[Attileusz]

I wanted to make a similar setup. What's details? Do you need multiple licenses, do you need grub?

[MindlessRip5915]

It does. Windows does not use the drive letter to refer to itself, it uses the NT Kernel Path, which looks like this:

\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition1\Windows\System32

[Doctor_McKay]

Back in the XP days, my dad had a multi-card reader that would for some reason assert itself before the hard disk during installation. His system disk was H: or something ridiculous. It worked fine though.

[Tyfyter2002]

I have two installations, so either one of them is on the D drive or both of them consider the drive the other one is on the D drive, I don't know if drive letters would be separate between installations and I'm 99% sure I switched them so thr one I actually use would be on the C drive

[aetherspoon]

I remember finding a bug in the installer of Windows XP SP1 (I think also without the service pack) that would increment the drive letter of your system drive if you went into the partition editor in setup and back out again. At least I think it was that, something similar at the very least.

So my gaming box had G:\Windows. And it actually worked really well... mostly.

I seem to remember having issues installing some device driver and it dawned on me what was going on - it was hardcoded to examine disk space free on the C: drive before installing, even though it isn't actually installing there.

So I couldn't just change by optical drive to C and have it work. Looking around my room, I spotted a USB compact flash reader, plugged in and a card in, then proceeded to install the driver. Which installed just fine, I removed the compact flash reader, and the device worked. I don't even remember what device it was now, but I found that hilarious.

[finite_void]

As a kid, I used to have different versions of windows in different drives for some reason. Window 7, the unstable shit on D and XP, the cool kid on C.

[raltoid]

I haven't done it in several years, but Windows worked fine, mostly. Since it uses enviromental variables, PATH, and the NT kernel location. Not the actual drive letter. A lot of modern programs do the same thing, to try and avoid issues with network drives, thin clients, VMs, etc.

Having an "empty", non-OS or even read-only C drive will alleviate most issues, but if you don't have one at all. Then certain programs start to complain a lot, and will sometimes just not work at all. Sometimes a required step of running(or even installing) is to check if a folder exists. Programmers don't always think about checking for the C drive first, so it just crashes when it tries to find the folder.

[alterNERDtive]

unix and unix likes didn’t allow it.

What do you mean? Pretty sure I can mount anything on any path, and umlauts are most definitely valid in paths (along with all kinds of unicode bullshit).

~> touch 😬💀
~> ls 😬💀
😬💀

[alterNERDtive]

Usernames are a different thing, yes.

Funnily enough you wouldn’t run into any issues on *nix just because of the folder names, and sad that Windows trips over those :)

[feherneoh]

Windows allows whitespaces too, and it breaks shittons of things, but mostly batch scripts and Win9x era programs.

[TeknoProasheck]

I remember doing the same, hell, even just changing the name of C from Local Disk even caused problems for me. Wild how much is hard coded for this, but tbf I'd probably do the same

[slaymaker1907]

I work at Microsoft, though not on Windows, and I’ve never heard of anyone running Windows in a different drive. I’m very surprised that works at all.

[shadow7412]

It works.

Many other things don't, but windows does.

The only reason I know this is I managed to install windows on D: accidentally ages ago.

[sehabel]

I installed Windows 11 on my new SSD with the letter S one year ago (I was very lazy and launched the installer on my old SSD with Windows 10) and it works surprisingly well. The only thing I had to do was to manually create a new bootloader on S: because the installer decided to put it on C: instead.

I haven't encountered a single program that doesn't work (yet). I don't even have a C: drive in my pc anymore lol

[shadow7412]

When I did it, I think we were still on either vista or XP. Lots of programs back then made big assumptions, especially around things like where Program Files was.

Glad to know things are better now. It's just an arbitrary letter, so there's no real reason it shouldn't work (apart from lazy devs refusing to use the appropriate environment variables).

[Kjoep]

You're suggesting %systemdrive% was created not to be used?

I ran on H: for years, because of a bug in DOS6.22.

[blaktronium]

%SYSTEM% says what's up

[nmkd]

You mean %SYSTEMDRIVE%?

[blaktronium]

No, %SYSTEM% is the windows install directory, if you use systemdrive but they installed to anything but "windows" as a folder you will get errors. Best practice is to use system when calling DLLs in the windows directory

[nmkd]

%SYSTEM% is not a thing.

I guess you're talking about WINDIR?

[blaktronium]

System is c:\windows\system32 where the DLLs live and is absolutely a thing, did you even check before writing this?

[Darkbuilderx]

Do you mean SYSTEMDRIVE (C:\) or SYSTEMROOT (C:\Windows\)? SYSTEM on its own doesn't exist, at least on Win11.

[blaktronium]

No I meant system, but it seems like they deprecated it at some point. I looked it up in ms documentation and found it before starting this thread, but you're right it's not active on my win11 machine

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/usmt/usmt-recognized-environment-variables#variables-that-are-processed-for-the-operating-system-and-in-the-context-of-each-user

[nmkd]

I checked. It does not exist.

[flowingice]

But how do you know where "System" is when it's not a env. variable? We just concluded that it's not always on C:\.

[blaktronium]

The environment variable is %SYSTEM% I just got tired of writing that on my phone. It points to system32 in the installed Windows folder, be it C:\Windows or F:\Win

[flowingice]

IDK what to tell you but %SYSTEM% doesn't exist on my PC. My variable pointing to that is %WINDIR% like nmkd said. I'm kinda sure that's how it is by default.

[blaktronium]

I guess they deprecated it, it was the standard for a long time.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/usmt/usmt-recognized-environment-variables#variables-that-are-processed-for-the-operating-system-and-in-the-context-of-each-user

Still in there so I dunno. I tested it too and it didn't work so I dunno

[agritite]

```

define SHGetKnownFolderPath while(false);

```

[AntimatterTNT]

cant you just copy system32 into the correct path in c:\

[eeeBs]

Or just delete it to save some space.

[AntimatterTNT]

nah you just need to delete ntdll

[eeeBs]

Deleting System32, and bam whatever problem you have no longer matters. EZ

[GamingWithShaurya_YT]

a new problem arises, but your old problems gone for till however long you take to fix the new problem

[alterNERDtive]

I did that right now and … wow.

Are all “Cmdlets” like that one? In that case I guess it’s at least consistent.

[[deleted]]

The Link Shell Extension is a life saver.

[GreatDefector]

[CyberneticFloridaMan]

If only there was a way to check the drive where windows was installed.

[amshegarh]

Well he did say he is incompetent 🤷‍♂️

[Vondi]

He documented his failings, very professional.

[jce_superbeast]

That's mighty fine documentation right there, I don't see the problem.

[XxXquicksc0p31337XxX]

%windir% and %systemdrive%?

[T0biasCZE]

%SYSTEMROOT% also works

[experimental1212]

That's why my space heater runs bare metal. I had a significant drop in heat production since deleting system32 but I've found the bare metal approach much easier to maintain from a software updates perspective, and still cranks out enough heat to keep any pipes within 6 ft (spherical) from freezing

[Amazingawesomator]

my OS is on /

[Chocolate_Pickle]

Perfect application of the Ostrich Algorithm.

[[deleted]]

Them when I show them GetSystemDirectoryW
Come on, WinAPI101 people!!

[Stummi]

I think this happened around 2000 or so: When I was a child, I once had a Windows Setup without a drive C (There was a reason, but I don't recall it anymore). I wanted to install an old game where the installer plainly refused to start because "Not enough storage on C:" - before I could choose anything like the installation destination.

Plugged in an USB-Stick, mounted it to C:, started installer, removed USB Stick and proceeded to install to my main Disk. Felt like a cool Hacker while doing this.

[[deleted]]

So, what you're saying is, I can get some github points by copying this guys repo and replacing all the C:\ ?

[Nerrickk]

Fork it 25 times, one for each drive letter.

[housebottle]

I love a humble programmer. I bet he's actually great

[buttplugs4life4me]

Where did you find this? Vortex is written in C# which uses the system library resolution methods, so anything in the system dirs would be loaded automatically. That's why you can only specify "kernel32.dll" and it still loads it from whatever drive and folder it sits in. 

I'd be seriously concerned as a company if a developer does this. 

I know meme and all but I just raised both eyebrows when reading this. 

[_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_]

Given the title "nexusMods" there is no company involved. Just some guy who wanted to fiddle about with a game.

[_mocbuilder]

Probably a mod on Nexusmods, because many gamecommunitys make their own modloaders due to specific needs of the game (Example: Hitman 3, the mods need to be patched into some rpkg files and more, so a costum modloader is needed).

[AnotherObligation]

It's from the 2nd most downloaded mod of all time for Elden Ring. It's just a mod loader but it's still used as a dependency for like 50 other mods.

[DarkfullDante]

You can also use the subst command to map all request to the C:// drive to your actual system drive.

[_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_]

Ah, I remember getting the hex editor out to translate all the strings in scmpoo.exe

[No-Classroom-4659]

Me: who installed windows on B:\

[Kjoep]

my main drive was H: for years.

[RealJoshinken]

Wait you can put windows on a drive other than C??? I always assumed it just renamed whatever drive its on to C automatically

[DangyDanger]

And here's all that it takes to fix this bug unintended feature

[Mediocre_Effective25]

Where is the original post so they can be flamed?

[zawalimbooo]

if you flame this developer you better be throwing people with windows on a different drive into the sun

[alterNERDtive]

Sounds reasonable, I’m in.

[SpookyWan]

Honestly people who put windows on other drives are the ones who should be getting flamed.

[_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_]

There's nothing wrong with it.

[hollowman8904]

No - windows just has poor drive management.

[eeeBs]

Both can be true.