Chrome browser, "Preferences can not be read" error

[szilagyic]

Hello:

We are on AppVol 2.10 and Horizon 6.1.1.  Ever since we've tried to deploy Chrome with AppVol, users that have Writable Volumes get the error "Your preferences can not be read." when opening Chrome.  If they make any changes to their Chrome profile the changes are not saved (for example, creating new Bookmarks, etc.).  There's also a popup when opening Chrome that says "Warning: Your Google Chrome settings are stored on a network drive.  This may result in slowdowns, crashes, or even loss of data.".  I'm assuming this is mainly from the Writable Volume, somehow Chrome must be seeing it as a "network location".

Is there a way to permanently resolve this?  I've looked around and so far I do not see a solution or mention of this error in relation to AppVol specifically.

Thanks.

[Ray_handels · Accepted solution]

You are correct. What happens is that Appvolumes attaches a disk as a mount point. For some reason Chrome sees this as a network drive and thus marks it unsafe and you'l get all kinds of freaky stuff.

This is however documented (and also replied to earlier in the forum) that Appvolumes has a workaround. What you need to do is give the writable volume a drive letter and then it works.

The way to do this is to create the following reg key on the golden image HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\services\svdriver\Parameters\DriveLetterSettings=6 (DWORD). What this key does is it gives the writable volume a drive letter in Windows and hides it so users cannot see it and misuse the writable volume to store information for example.

[szilagyic]

I have applied this anyway, but it seems that AppVol 2.12 has fixed that error.

[Ray_handels]

For as far as I know you still need that key otherwise it wont work at all.

Thing is that it wasn't really fixed in older version. I believe it still was an issue with version 2.11. I have tested it with 2.12 and the drivelettersetting=6 setting and it does work now.