How are drive letters assigned?

every time I plug in my two external hard drives a USB drive and an SD card they are assigned random drive letters, this plays havoc with back ups.

Is there any way to nail them down so that, for example, my Packard Bell Store & Save always shows as 'H' or something instead of 'G' or 'F'?

I'm using Windows Vista.

There is a way Ken (at least with XP) because a local guru set mine up for me. Snag is I can't remember how.

Might be worth a PM to Algi, Greynolds or HG, I think those guys are PC literate plus


regards
Bernard

Don't you mount & assign the drive letter to a device??? I use a NAS plugged straight into my router, so always keep same drive letter..

Hi Ken,

I've just acquired an IcyBox and put a 2TB WD Caviar Green in it, connected with eSATA II. I used Acronis True Image Western Digital Edition (free to download from WD BTW) to format and prepare the drive, every time I start the PC the drive shows up as I:, even if I've had it unplugged! This has never happened before, my thinking is it's something to do with the Acronis software. My Sandisk card reader always shows up as the next available drive letter, which in my case was D: as my scratch disk was always drive E: by choice.

John

In Win XP:

My Computer > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management

Scroll to the selected drive

Right click the drive in the list and select "Change Drive Letter"

John

I seem to remember that in Vista (I'm on Win7 now) you click your start button, and in the empty search box at the bottom, you type in MMC. this should open up your disk management consol. From there (with all your MASS STORAGE DEVICES (sd card reader, ext. h/d, etc), you should be able to assign drive letters. If you are able to do this, remember to assign in reverse order, ensuring that the protocol looks as follows:

DRIVE A - 3.5in disk drive
DRIVE C - main internal h/d (contains o/s, progs, data)
DRIVE D - recovery sector
DRIVE E - CD/DVD/BLURAY Reader

In other words, B, and F through to Z should be available for you to assign each device. Pity I'm not in Glasgow, Ken.. I could've come over to do it for you if it's too much like technical jiggery-pokery for you.

With a FAT32 drive Windows looks to see if there are any Primary partitions first and will give that partition a high drive letter. On removable drives it's better not to have any Primary partitions.... just have one Extended partition split into whatever Logical partitions you want. These should be given letters further down the alphabet.

johnwhit has already explained how to change the drive letters.

Why don't you consider using Truecrypt.

This is encryption software - always a sensible precaution I feel - that has little impact on read/write speeds.

If you select the option to encrypt the entire drive you can subsequently select the driver letter to 'mount' the decrypted volume to.

Works well for me.

I seem to remember that in Vista (I'm on Win7 now) you click your start button, and in the empty search box at the bottom, you type in MMC. this should open up your disk management consol.

I must confess, I body swerved Vista after having to remove it from countless pre-loaded machines and replace it with XP. Next OS will be Windows 7 x64, this is the reason I keep the drive letter "D" unassigned so I can set up a new partition on the primary drive and dual boot Win XP Pro SP3 x86 (32 bit) and Windows 7 64 bit. I'm sure I'm gonna get the BSOD as soon as Windows 7 detects the SCSI controller that I'm still using More fun and games

Just need to find a Core 2 Duo E8600, E8500 or E8400 so if any one has one at a decent price they're not using I've got the cash waiting

John

You are probably better moving any CD/DVD drives right out of the
way by assigning them to something like S and T

Plug all your drives in if possible before booting the PC.

Card readers are better if they only contain enough card slots
to cover what you will actaually use i.e. if you only use SDHC
just a single slot card reader will do. Unfortunately it's hard
to find a decent single slot card reader, so a dual slot is
OK especially if it's a Sandisk Extreme or a Lexar.

This may be of some interest:


http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbdlm_e.html

John

......and it works a treat

John