USB Drive Letter

Lemur said:

Call up Disk Management. Find your device. Right click. Change drive letter and paths.

Thanks for the suggestion but that does not accomplish what I am trying to accomplish. That will allow me to manually change the drive letter of my external hard drive however when I disconnect the drive from the PC and then reconnect it at a later time it will not necessarily get that same drive letter again.

So, to clarify, my question is how do I "force" my external USB hard drive to always be assigned the letter N even after it is disconnected then re-connected and even if there are other unused letters before N?

Thanks
Peter

Setting drive letters once isnt particularly helpful. Drive letters are saved but they are not reserved when the drive is not attached. They are recycled as a result of which assignment of a particular letter to a particular former drive is lost.

What you can do is to manually assign higher letters to external drives. That way, they'll be far away so from the default lowest free letters. Also, try using the same usb port everytime for a particular device.

You can also try the "USB Drive Letter Manager".

USB drive letter manager - USBDLM

Bill2 said:

You can also try the "USB Drive Letter Manager".

Bill2:

Thanks. I have been experimenting with USB Drive Letter Manager. I just wanted to see if there is a way to do this directly in Windows or perhaps by putting something in the drive's autorun.inf file.

Peter

I appreciate the suggestion on how to change a drive letter but that's not exactly what I am trying to do. I am trying to ensure that a particular external drive will always be assigned the letter N whenever it is connected to the PC. The method you presented will work OK for a drive that is always connected to the PC (such as an internal drive) but I am talking about an external drive which gets connected/disconnected frequently.

Changing the drive letter manually - whether through Disk Management or editing the registry - will indeed change the letter until the drive is disconnected from the PC and then reconnected at a later time. When the drive is reconnected later it will not necessarily be given the same letter. I would then have to manually change the letter again.

What I am looking for is something that will "force" the external drive to always be assigned the same letter even when it is disconnected/reconnected. As of now the USB Drive Letter Manager seems to be the only way to accomplish this - but I am still open to other ideas anyone may have.

Peter

When you disconnect and then re-connect your drive after manually setting the drive letter, it gets re-assigned a different letter?

FliGi7:

1. I connect my external USB drive and then manually change the drive letter to N.
2. I then disconnect my external drive from the PC.
3. A week later I reconnect my external drive to the PC. Most likely it will be assigned whatever the lowest available letter is at that moment. It may or may not be N.

Peter

if you assign manually a drive letter to a USB device, the next time it will be the same letter again.