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#1
Mysterious Drive Letter Change
I have a non-serious, but puzzling situation. I have an external USB Iomega hard drive. I have it set to be Drive Y. It works just fine. But every once in a while, its drive letter changes. The first time this happened, I thought that the drive wasn't working, because I tried to copy something to drive Y, and found I had no drive Y, even though the power light on the drive was lit, and the drive appeared to be functioning. The only tell tale hint I had was that right after Windows finished booting, I got what I'll call an "error beep"--the sound that Windows makes when you try to do something you aren't allowed to do. Rebooting did not, however, bring the Y drive back. However, what DID happen was that after Windows had booted, I got a dialog box that asked me what I wanted to do with the Iomega drive J--the kind of box you get when you insert media into a removable media drive. That gave me the clue that the drive was working, it had just been assigned a different drive letter (J was the first unassigned drive letter on my system). I went to Disk Management, changed the drive letter back to Y, and all was well.
Since then, this has happened about 3 or 4 more times. Each time, I can use the Disk Management feature to reset the drive letter, and it is then fine for several days or weeks. Does anyone have a clue what could be causing this behavior?