Greetings!
A friend of mine asked me for help with a newly bought Dell laptop. He got a model that supports two harddrives, and moved the original harddrive to the second drive bay, and a newly bought SSD as the primary drive.
He wants to install Windows 8 and some work applications to the SSD, and keep the majority of his data on the "normal" harddrive.
I tried to help him set this up, as I did the same with my Windows 7 desktop PC where this worked flawlessly, and the User Directory as well as ProgramData Directory were relocated to my second drive.
With the Windows 8 Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK), I created an unattended.xml file containing the following:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><unattend xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:unattend"><settings pass="oobeSystem"><component name="Microsoft-Windows-Shell-Setup" processorArchitecture="amd64" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"><FolderLocations><ProfilesDirectory>D:\Users</ProfilesDirectory><ProgramData>D:\ProgramData</ProgramData></FolderLocations></component></settings></unattend>
This file gets copied to an USB Stick that is plugged in during the installation. The install runs through completely, and after installation I find the User Directory on the harddrive D: and the system itself on the SSD drive C:.
The problem is, after successful installation using the XML file, the standard Windows 8 Apps like Bing Search, Weather, People and so on are missing. Clicking the store tile doesn't work at all. It "moves" to register the click, but the store app doesn't open, not even the splash screen.
And most importantly, trying to access the PC Settings by opening the Charms menu on the right, clicking the Settings cog, and trying to open the PC Settings at the bottom, also doesn't work.
I have seen pages with a similar problem, where the settings "app" opened with the splash screen popping up, and then immediately closing, and people having fixed it with "sfc /scannow". But that didn't help in our case, as even the splash screen wouldn't appear.
The friend then tried a standard installation with the install disc only without the XML, and Windows 8 worked as expected, but then everything is placed on the SSD drive.
If possible, we'd like to keep using the method of relocating the User directory during the install with the Unattended XML instead of relocating the stuff afterwards with symbolic links and stuff.
Has anyone else encountered the problem?
Ümflancht net 'rum!