Urgent help please - Deploying to a networked drive

[cadams]

I'd like to thank you all upfront for any help that you could provide.

What I am trying to do is deploy a set of files to our 140 odd schools. The files should be deployed to O:\ which is a mapping that we ask all the schools to have to make our life easy. We are deploying text based files to O:\ and in some cases also to O:\Formats. The current installer I've made detects if an O:\ is mapped and then sets the INSTALLDIR to O:\. If there isn't an O:\ then it installs to C:\. The installation is being performed by people with very little IT exposure and as such I'd like to detect the drive before I give them a change to install to another drive. I detect the drive using the following script written in VB.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
On Error Resume Next
strComputer = "." 'You could replace this with:
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")

ifExists = 0
Session.Property("INSTALLDIR") = "C:\"


Set colItems = objWMIService.ExecQuery("Select * from Win32_LogicalDisk",,48)
For Each objItem in colItems
if objItem.Caption = "O:" then
ifExists = 1
end if
NEXT

if ifExists = 1 then
Session.Property("INSTALLDIR") = "O:\"
'wscript.echo "Found"
end if
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Now the major problem is that each school implements their own network so some are MS based, others are UNIX and others are Novell. I'm not sure if this is a problem but my installer doesn't work in some cases. There maybe an O:\ but it isn't detected. Our UNC paths should be \\xxxxadm01\maze 7\ where xxxx is a different code in every school.

Can anyone suggeest a better way or shed some light on why my installer won't work in all cases? I'm using InstallShield 10.5

Thanks
Cam

[dhogan]

I think it depends on how you are rolling out your app. If you have your somewhat inexperienced people doing the installs manually, then you may have to depend on them knowing enough to select the proper drive during the setup. Otherwise, if you are using something like SMS or another deployment tool, you could have it run your VB script ahead of the setup to map the drive.
This could be a tough one, considering you have such a diverse environment.