How do you make Windows 7 fully case-sensitive with respect to the filesystem?

I want to make Windows 7 case-sensitive when it reads/writes anything on the hard drive (the C drive, or any other NTFS drive).

I found a video via google that says to change the registry key

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\DontPrettyPath

to a value of 1 (source).

I also found a Windows support item that says something about modifying the registry key

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\kernel\obcaseinsensitive

that leads me to assume putting a value of 0 will make Windows case-sensitive with NTFS filesystems (source).

I have a feeling the second solution is the answer, but I'm not sure and I don't want to try it without being sure.

Does anyone know for sure what is the correct way to make Windows 7 case-sensitive when it reads/writes to the C drive (and any other NTFS drive)?

Answer

You can set the HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\kernel\ dword:ObCaseInsensitive registry value to 0 as other authors suggested. Create a file named add.reg with the following content and run it.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\kernel]
"obcaseinsensitive"=dword:00000000

Then use Cygwin to work with case-sensitive filenames.

In order to do so, you need to mount NTFS filesystems with posix=1 option in your /etc/fstab, as this article suggests. Here's a snippet from my fstab:

none                    /cygdrive       cygdrive        binary,posix=1,user             0 0
C:                      /cygdrive/c     ntfs            binary,posix=1,user,auto        0 0
C:/Users                /home           ntfs            binary,posix=1,user,auto        0 0

Once the above is done, you'll be able to deal with case-sensitive filenames using bash, mc, git etc.