Vista - Permanantley set External USB drive letter

I have a number of external drives on my laptop, Lacie USB, PCMCIA Compact
Flash, Jump Drive etc.
I am always plugging the Lacie USB drive into the same port.

However the drive letter is not persistant, using diskmanager I set it to
drive F, there is nothing on D or E.
Sometimes it will ignore my assignment and assign it the next available
letter after C:

However my CF card is assigned the letter N and it has never failed to be
correctly assigned.

How can I make my USB drive assignement permanent ?

Hi, Michael.

It works for me. (Don't you just love that kind of answer?)

In Disk Management, are there any drive letter conflicts? Especially
"sometime" conflicts? Like, maybe, a digital camera or some other device
that is not a "drive" but does get assigned a "drive" letter when it is
connected or activated? Are you on a network that may be assigning some
"drive" letters to network drives? Is your LaCie drive plugged to an
onboard USB port, or to a hub?

I'm just shooting in the dark. I have no external hard drives, but I do
have a couple of USB "thumb" drives, a SanDisk SD card reader, a camera,
etc., in addition to 4 SATA hard drives (over a dozen volumes) and a couple
of PATA DVD/RWs. And a new little Nextar MP3 audio/video/FM device that the
kids got me for my birthday last week. There's no problem assigning them
all "drive" letters and having those letters persist when the devices are
unplugged and plugged in again.

Another long shot: Right-click on that drive in Disk Management, then click
Properties and the Policies tab. Most devices don't have this tab, but when
they do, we can choose between Optimize for quick removal (no write cache)
and Optimize for performance. It seems to me that this should not affect
the drive lettering, but you might want to check it out.

Let us know what you learn about this. Someone else may be having the same
problem.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
rc@grandecom.net
Microsoft Windows MVP
(Running Windows Live Mail beta in Vista Ultimate x64)

"Michael Tissington" <mtissington@newsgroups.nospam> wrote in message
news:ObZ3tMmxHHA.4516@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl...
>I have a number of external drives on my laptop, Lacie USB, PCMCIA Compact
>Flash, Jump Drive etc.
> I am always plugging the Lacie USB drive into the same port.
>
> However the drive letter is not persistant, using diskmanager I set it to
> drive F, there is nothing on D or E.
> Sometimes it will ignore my assignment and assign it the next available
> letter after C:
>
> However my CF card is assigned the letter N and it has never failed to be
> correctly assigned.
>
> How can I make my USB drive assignement permanent ?

On Sat, 14 Jul 2007 16:06:04 -0600, "Michael Tissington"
<mtissington@newsgroups.nospam> wrote:

>I have a number of external drives on my laptop, Lacie USB, PCMCIA Compact
>Flash, Jump Drive etc.
>I am always plugging the Lacie USB drive into the same port.
>
>However the drive letter is not persistant, using diskmanager I set it to
>drive F, there is nothing on D or E.
>Sometimes it will ignore my assignment and assign it the next available
>letter after C:
>
>However my CF card is assigned the letter N and it has never failed to be
>correctly assigned.
>
>How can I make my USB drive assignement permanent ?

Check out USBDLM (USB Drive Letter Manager)

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

It worked for me but takes a little bit to set up. Good luck!

Weeds

*Please remove the obvious for my correct email address*

This will happen if you use the external drive on another machine, then bring it
back to the laptop. Windows writes a random signature hash to an unused spot in
the MBR and that value is stored in the registry to associate the drive with a
drive letter. If you connect to another system, that hash is replaced, and the
previous associating is lost.

As long as you never connect the drive to another system, it'll remember the
drive letter.

This has worked this way since 2K.

On Sat, 14 Jul 2007 16:06:04 -0600, "Michael Tissington"
<mtissington@newsgroups.nospam> wrote:

>I have a number of external drives on my laptop, Lacie USB, PCMCIA Compact
>Flash, Jump Drive etc.
>I am always plugging the Lacie USB drive into the same port.
>
>However the drive letter is not persistant, using diskmanager I set it to
>drive F, there is nothing on D or E.
>Sometimes it will ignore my assignment and assign it the next available
>letter after C:
>
>However my CF card is assigned the letter N and it has never failed to be
>correctly assigned.
>
>How can I make my USB drive assignement permanent ?

John Will
Microsoft MVP - Networking

Any source for this information? As as I've seen Windows 2000
and higher write a signature only when they find an empty one.



Gunrunnerjohn wrote:
> This will happen if you use the external drive on another machine, then bring it
> back to the laptop. Windows writes a random signature hash to an unused spot in
> the MBR and that value is stored in the registry to associate the drive with a
> drive letter. If you connect to another system, that hash is replaced, and the
> previous associating is lost.
>
> As long as you never connect the drive to another system, it'll remember the
> drive letter.
>
> This has worked this way since 2K.
>
> On Sat, 14 Jul 2007 16:06:04 -0600, "Michael Tissington"
> <mtissington@newsgroups.nospam> wrote:
>
>> I have a number of external drives on my laptop, Lacie USB, PCMCIA Compact
>> Flash, Jump Drive etc.
>> I am always plugging the Lacie USB drive into the same port.
>>
>> However the drive letter is not persistant, using diskmanager I set it to
>> drive F, there is nothing on D or E.
>> Sometimes it will ignore my assignment and assign it the next available
>> letter after C:
>>
>> However my CF card is assigned the letter N and it has never failed to be
>> correctly assigned.
>>
>> How can I make my USB drive assignement permanent ?
>
> John Will
> Microsoft MVP - Networking