Windows 7: Remembering drive letters

I just started seeing an issue with my external drives connected to my laptop running Windows 7 Home Premium x64. I have 2 external drives connected via USB to my laptop. In the past, when I unplugged the drives, and later reconnected them, the previously assigned drive letters (X: and Y: ) were again properly assigned to the two external drives. Lately, when I reconnect the USB drives, they get assigned the next drive letters in sequence (E: and F:, respectively). What is causing this behavior and how can I force them to remember their old "assigned" letter? I assigned the drive letters using the manage computer, disk management, change drive letter process. I always use the "safely remove hardware and eject media" feature prior to unplugging the drives... and I have not changed any behavior on my part.



Both stay connected to the same powered USB hub... rather than messing with the drives individually, I just use the remove hardware applet and then unplug the hub. I always use the same USB port for the hub, and the drive themselves stay connected to the hub... BTW, this used to work perfectly under both XP and Windows 7 ... until recently...

Here ya go:

Hard Drives - Lock a Drive Letter

That was the process that I used to set the drives up... and it worked perfectly on both XP and Windows 7 until a couple of days ago... at that point when I disconnected the drives and reconnected them, the drive letters no longer stuck... and the system assigned new drive letters.

So what change was made to the system a couple of days ago?

Like it says on the referenced page, it's best if you assign the next available. Also you can set "hide empty drives" to hide removable drives that are usually empty like memory stick slots. If the drive letters you assign are the next available they won't shift around so much.

I use the letters toward the end of the alphabet for mapped network drives.

Nothing, as far as I know.

Yes, I read that part, but it has worked perfectly until now... for over 3 years with XP and at least 8 months with Window 7...

C: is my system drive
D: is a recovery partition
E: is a SD card slot
W: is my Writable CD/DVD drive
X: is the eXternal drive #1
Y: is the external drive #2

have a look at this solution: USB drive letter manager - USBDLM

Interesting... but why do I need a 3rd party app to do what Windows 7 did perfectly well until a few days ago?

"until now" being the operative phrase. Getting something to work is one thing. Figuring out why it died is for autopsies.