Locking drive letters

[nuccii]

Problem with USB storage device My Book Essential with WD Smartware. When the computer comes out of sleep mode, the drive letter, as an example, has changed from M to K or the reverse and at times the drive it self is not visable at all and can only be visable by rebooting the computer. This causes problems for my Backup software (Acronis). How can I permanately lock the drive letter. I have tried Disk Management to no avail. According to Western Digital the OS, Windows 7 32 bit, is overwriting the drive letter allocation and falls beyond their scope of knowledge.

 

[surfasb]

That is odd. You right clicked the partition in Disk Management and assigned a letter?

Sometimes, giving the partitions unique names will help also.

 

[nuccii]

Done that. Problem still exits.

 

[surfasb]

well, no luck here then. Odd. I use a $10 SATA external interface and this doesn't happen here...

 

[whs]

Try to assign a "high" letter like x, y, z. They usually do not get changed. It is a little unusual though that M and K get changed. You must have a lot of partitions and USB devices.

 

[nuccii]

One partition on primary HD and two USB devices. Z sounds like a good idea, I used it on the last external drive I had before it bought the farm.

 

[nuccii]

Z did not hold. I am at a loss

 

[whs]

Hmm, I am at my wits end too. It always worked for me. Given that you have very few letters used, I really wonder what is going on.

 

[TVeblen]

I don't know if this will help you, but I installed an Epson wireless network printer a while back, and because it has card reading capabilities it shows up in the OS as another drive. That was causing some drive letter issues for me, so I changed the printer's letter to W, and now my external drives are assigned predictable letters once again.

It also might be of help if you could post a screen shot of your Disk Management" window.

 

[nuccii]

I use a HP Officejet J6480 which is a wireless network printer and has card reading capabilities however no drive letter has been assigned to it.

 

[Bill2]

1) Try this, it may or may not work.

Start -> Type compmgmt.msc and press Enter -> Storage -> Disk Management.
Right click on your drive, then select "Change drive letter and paths...".
In the window that pops up, click on "Change' at the bottom.
Click on "Assign the following drive letter" and enter the letter of your choice.
Click OK and close all windows.

2) If 1) does not work, i doubt there is any option other than trying out USB Drive Letter Manager.

 

[DarkStar GT]

I use a HP Officejet J6480 which is a wireless network printer and has card reading capabilities however no drive letter has been assigned to it.

Try giving that device a low letter - "W" perhaps as TVeblen did.

 

[whs]

I use a HP Officejet J6480 which is a wireless network printer and has card reading capabilities however no drive letter has been assigned to it.

Try giving that device a low letter - "W" perhaps as TVeblen did.

He tried that with "Z" - and that did not work either. I understand they are going to fix that in Windows8. But for now it is a mess.

 

[nuccii]

If I understand correctly, it looks like nothing can be done for now. I guess I will have to stop the computer from going into sleep mode. Any further thoughts. Thanks for your time whs.