External USB Drive Letter

gramps

gramps

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I have a USB drive attached to my laptop, Drive Letter F
Every now and again, (guessing when I use a USB stick or something), the Drive Letter changes, e.g. to G, causing my local backup to fail, as it can't see the backup series it's looking for.
So I go into the Drive Admin and change it back to F so that my backup gets back on track.
Is there any way I can lock the drive to Drive Letter F and stop this happening ?

TIA
 
I set mine to Z, Y, X etc in drive manager, this means the pc doesn't automatically assign a drive letter I want to use to my backup drive.
 
My external hard drive (F) became (E) recently - no idea why as I haven't added or removed another device.

I'll be keen to see what those in the know say.
 
You should be able to set a specific drive letter that the USB will always use. It used to be a problem until XP SP3 was released but MS did release a hotfix for earlier versions. WindowsXP-KB297694-x86-ENU

If you have Vista or Windows 7 then you should be able to permanently assign it in drive manager without a hotfix.

What version of Windows are you using?

The necessary files can be found here. The first if you have XP SP2 and the second for XP SP3.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297694/en-us
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/961187
 
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You can actually name a drive too, in addition to the drive letter.
I have a couple of Lacie external drives, one on top of the other, and I've labelled them "top Lacie" and "bottom Lacie". It makes it dead easy to see which one you're looking at.
 
are you plugging in another external device that is taking the drive letter?

plug every drive you have in and manually set the letters on all while plugged in, they should then stick.
 
neil_g said:
are you plugging in another external device that is taking the drive letter?

plug every drive you have in and manually set the letters on all while plugged in, they should then stick.
Click to expand...

I normally only have the one USB drive (permanently) connected but sometimes I use a multi-card reader (which then temp adds 3-4 other drive letters) and that doesn't seem to be an issue.
Other than that the only things that get conencted are random USB sticks, i.e. more than could be plugged into the 4 x available USB ports at any one time.
I just wondered if there was any way that I could make my USB external drive a fixed permanent Drive Letter so that it wouldn't ever get displaced?
 
No way of removing the 'implanted' drive letter of other things?
 
So this morning the USB Drive was drive 'F' and nothing extra has been connected to the laptop all day, however the Drive is now 'G' - looks like it's got a mind of its own :thinking:
 
did you turn on your printer as that takes a drive letter too
 
Yardbent said:
did you turn on your printer as that takes a drive letter too
Click to expand...

The printer is on the network, in the office, so not attached to the laptop which is in the house, so I am assuming that wouldn't take a drive letter from the laptop.
 
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