The obscure registry hack of the day is...
>rolls dice
"Always start the FAT and NTFS filesystem drivers at boot"
REGEDIT4

; Extremely stripped down/weird/unsupported system configurations can result
; in the NTFS filesystem driver not starting automatically, mostly on systems
; where the Windows "boot volume" isn't NTFS: Windows PE won't load NTFS.SYS
; if it's "flat booted" from another, supported filesystem (such as UDF), and
; full-fat Windows booted from (say) a BtrFS using a third-party bootloader/
; FS driver combo (such as Quibble/WinBtrfs) won't either. As an aside, this
; also happens with the "FastFAT" (to give it its proper name) driver, and
; has similar results, but as FAT isn't nearly as widely used as it once was,
; it's not so critical; I have included it here anyway for completeness.
;
; This happens because, interestingly, Windows doesn't actually autostart FS
; drivers by default: it has 'FS recogniser' drivers (presumably to save on
; memory) which, if they detect a volume of a given file system, will load
; the full FS driver. As such, if you DO have FAT or NTFS volumes attached to
; your system at boot time, Windows (or more precisely, these FAT/NTFS
; recogniser drivers) will load the full-fat FS drivers... but if you don't,
; it will cause issues later, for example, trying to format a volume with
; NTFS, as (obviously) formatting requires the full NTFS driver to be loaded.
;
; To avoid these problems - at the cost of a megabyte or two extra of memory
; usage even if you don't have FAT or NTFS volumes connected - this will
; configures both the FastFAT and NTFS drivers to automatically start at boot
; time.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\FastFAT]
"Start"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NTFS]
"Start"=dword:00000001