New
#1
Windows is mucking around with my HD drive letters
I have 3 external USB hard drives/partitions: J & K which are two partitions in a Western Digital 2 TB USB3 HDD; L & M ditto on another identical WD 2 TB HDD; and occasionally N which is a 465 GB LaCie USB2 HDD. When the two WD drives are disconnected, N changes to I. Another variation is with the J and K drives connected but not the N, J is re-lettered to I.
This caused a potentially serious problem recently when I went to make a test clone of my 256 GB SSD (my C: drive) on to N. In the confusion I actually started the cloning to my X, a 1 TB internal which contains all my documents, Pictures etc. etc. and had been re-lettered to N (I am a little hazy about the lettering now). My X (now re-lettered to I masquerading as N) was immediately wiped (cloning does that) and I had to spend many hours copying back all those files (857 GB) from J (my backup of X which fortunately was up to date). I have noticed similar behaviour before at various times.
To avoid this in the future, I have renamed all my HDDs with their correct drive letters. For example, C: to CCCCC and X to XXXXX. Being the name of the HDD rather than its letter, it (hopefully) will not change, so I can ignore those pesky drive letters. (Image attached.)
-- But why does Windows play around like this? (Whenever I change a drive's letter I am warned that software that relies on letters might get confused, so there must be a reason for letters.)
-- Can I get it to stop changing drive letters?
Thanks.