Insight sought: External HDD drive letter assignment.

[zeugma]

I have a 500Gb external HDD connected to my PC, Seagate FreeAgent, USB.
It's been there for ages and has always been mapped to drive letter F by the OS.
Yesterday, for no apparent reason, when I booted the system it appeared as drive G.
As far as I can tell, there are no other changes. It is still read / write accessible and passes OS health checks.
I cold booted the system today and it is still drive G.
Any thoughts as to why it has been remapped?

 

[troutfisher]

Mine does that when I plug a USB memory sick in.

 

[petersmart]

AFAIK the computer simply assigns any drive the next letter available.

Have you added any new hardware to your PC such as DVD re-writer, another internal HDD, another external HDD?

It won't affect the working of your External HDD unless you have created a shortcut to it.

You can change the drive letter of almost any HDD or re-writer from within Disk Management (Control Panel.>Administrative Tools>Computer Management>Disk Management), although you may have to re-assign different Drive letters to various devices just to get yours to fit in.

 

[zeugma]

AFAIK the computer simply assigns any drive the next letter available.

Have you added any new hardware to your PC such as DVD re-writer, another internal HDD, another external HDD?

It won't affect the working of your External HDD unless you have created a shortcut to it.

You can change the drive letter of almost any HDD or re-writer from within Disk Management (Control Panel.>Administrative Tools>Computer Management>Disk Management), although you may have to re-assign different Drive letters to various devices just to get yours to fit in.

No new hardware, no changes. No USB pendrive left inserted when the system booted.
I know how to reassign drive letters and the impact of doing so - thanks for the thought though...
It's just an arbitrary change for no apparent reason - very odd.