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#1
May 27th 12, 01:33 AM
posted to alt.windows7.general
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Changing Drive Letters
I have several USB drives on my Win7 (32) system. When I swap a drive
into the mix sometimes the Letter assignments change. I am using Sync Toy for Backups. It requires that the sync pairs be defined by Drive letter. How can I keep the Letters from changing on Drives I have not moved? John Ferrell W8CCW 
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#2
May 27th 12, 02:09 AM
posted to alt.windows7.general
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Changing Drive Letters
John Ferrell wrote:
I have several USB drives on my Win7 (32) system. When I swap a drive into the mix sometimes the Letter assignments change. I am using Sync Toy for Backups. It requires that the sync pairs be defined by Drive letter. How can I keep the Letters from changing on Drives I have not moved? Windows doesn't guarantee drive letter assignment even if you plug the device into the same USB port. If you plug a device into a different USB port, Windows might find the old enumeration data in the registry that was recorded before so it know what type of device it is and what driver, if any, to use. You might get the same drive letter but not if something else already has it. Even plugging into the same USB port might result in a different driver letter either because the device requires re-enumeration or another device already has the drive letter. For forcing drive letter assignment (by the device's enumeration data whether read in or already recorded), you'll need a 3rd party tool, like USB Safely Remove: http://safelyremove.com/ ($19.90). Zentimo has a few more features (see http://zentimo.com/zentimovsusbsr.htm, plus it costs more) but it's not likely you'll need the extras: http://zentimo.com/ ($29.90).
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#3
May 27th 12, 02:14 AM
posted to alt.windows7.general
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Changing Drive Letters
On Sat, 26 May 2012 20:33:51 -0400, John Ferrell wrote:
I have several USB drives on my Win7 (32) system. When I swap a drive into the mix sometimes the Letter assignments change. I am using Sync Toy for Backups. It requires that the sync pairs be defined by Drive letter. How can I keep the Letters from changing on Drives I have not moved? John Ferrell W8CCW Mount the external drives to an empty Windows folder and refer to that folder, rather than a drive letter, in SyncToy. In Disk Management, instead of assigning a drive letter to a drive, assign a folder name. It must be an empty folder, and it seems better to use a given folder always for the same drive. On the other hand - as I think about it, I seem to recall that if you just assign a drive letter to a given drive, it won't change, as long as it's high enough in the alphabet to never get automatically assigned to another drive. And again, don't assign the same letter to different drives. Have you been victimized yet by SyncToy's way of dealing with transitions to and from Daylight Saving Time? Or did they finally fix it? -- Gene E. Bloch (Stumbling Bloch)
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#4
May 27th 12, 02:16 AM
posted to alt.windows7.general
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Changing Drive Letters
On Sat, 26 May 2012 18:14:51 -0700, Gene E. Bloch wrote:
On Sat, 26 May 2012 20:33:51 -0400, John Ferrell wrote: I have several USB drives on my Win7 (32) system. When I swap a drive into the mix sometimes the Letter assignments change. I am using Sync Toy for Backups. It requires that the sync pairs be defined by Drive letter. How can I keep the Letters from changing on Drives I have not moved? John Ferrell W8CCW Mount the external drives to an empty Windows folder and refer to that folder, rather than a drive letter, in SyncToy. In Disk Management, instead of assigning a drive letter to a drive, assign a folder name. It must be an empty folder, and it seems better to use a given folder always for the same drive. On the other hand - as I think about it, I seem to recall that if you just assign a drive letter to a given drive, it won't change, as long as it's high enough in the alphabet to never get automatically assigned to another drive. And again, don't assign the same letter to different drives. Have you been victimized yet by SyncToy's way of dealing with transitions to and from Daylight Saving Time? Or did they finally fix it? BTW, be sure to exclude from your backup the folder name you use for mounting :-) -- Gene E. Bloch (Stumbling Bloch)
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#5
May 27th 12, 02:48 AM
posted to alt.windows7.general
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Changing Drive Letters
John Ferrell wrote:
I have several USB drives on my Win7 (32) system. When I swap a drive into the mix sometimes the Letter assignments change. I am using Sync Toy for Backups. It requires that the sync pairs be defined by Drive letter. How can I keep the Letters from changing on Drives I have not moved? John Ferrell W8CCW Use Disk Management to assign specific drive letters to your USB devices, preferably letters above the current sequence, like P,Q,R or X,Y,Z. You can even assign different drive letters to different devices using the same USB port. -- Crash "I'm told that Wagner's music is not as bad as it sounds." ~ Mark Twain ~
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#6
May 27th 12, 01:40 PM
posted to alt.windows7.general
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Changing Drive Letters
On Sat, 26 May 2012 20:33:51 -0400, John Ferrell wrote:
I have several USB drives on my Win7 (32) system. When I swap a drive into the mix sometimes the Letter assignments change. I am using Sync Toy for Backups. It requires that the sync pairs be defined by Drive letter. How can I keep the Letters from changing on Drives I have not moved? John Ferrell W8CCW Insert the USB drives, then open Disk Management: click the start button and then type diskmgmt.msc, or go into Control Panel: Change Drive Letters and Paths. A display will show your current drives. Right-click the first one you want to assign, and change its letter. Repeat for the others. -- Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA http://OakRoadSystems.com Shikata ga nai...
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#7
May 27th 12, 01:42 PM
posted to alt.windows7.general
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Changing Drive Letters
On Sat, 26 May 2012 20:09:35 -0500, VanguardLH wrote:
For forcing drive letter assignment (by the device's enumeration data whether read in or already recorded), you'll need a 3rd party tool, like USB Safely Remove: http://safelyremove.com/ ($19.90). In my experience, no third-party tool is required. Windows does not automatically use the same letter every time for the same device, but when I assign a letter to a device once, Windows remembers it for all future connections of that device. -- Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA http://OakRoadSystems.com Shikata ga nai...
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#8
May 27th 12, 07:00 PM
posted to alt.windows7.general
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Changing Drive Letters
On Sat, 26 May 2012 20:33:51 -0400, John Ferrell wrote:
I have several USB drives on my Win7 (32) system. When I swap a drive into the mix sometimes the Letter assignments change. I am using Sync Toy for Backups. It requires that the sync pairs be defined by Drive letter. How can I keep the Letters from changing on Drives I have not moved? If you give it a drive letter immediately after your non-removable frives, it should remain the same. I have an external hard drive that is K:, and I tryo to set USB flash drives as J:, but sometimes need to reset them by running: diskmgmt.msc -- Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk
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#9
May 27th 12, 08:06 PM
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Changing Drive Letters
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#11
May 27th 12, 08:58 PM
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Changing Drive Letters
Stan Brown wrote:
VanguardLH wrote: For forcing drive letter assignment (by the device's enumeration data whether read in or already recorded), you'll need a 3rd party tool, like USB Safely Remove: http://safelyremove.com/ ($19.90). In my experience, no third-party tool is required. Windows does not automatically use the same letter every time for the same device, but when I assign a letter to a device once, Windows remembers it for all future connections of that device. And yet I have seen, almost every couple of cold boots, where a USB dongle will have its drive letter changed. I'll assign it "M" (which is above anything else that gets assigned). There is no other removable media (USB or other devices) getting assigned drive letters above "E". Yet, after a a couple cold boots, that dongle might end up getting assigned the next drive letter available (which is "E" since "D" is the last one for a hard disk). This screws up my backups wanting to use drive E. I hide a third hard disk by not assigning it a drive letter until the backup job runs. The backup job has a pre-command function so I use diskpart to assign the drive letter before the backup, run the backup (which expects to save to drive E), and remove the drive letter after the backup completes. Because the dongle gets assigned "E" (when the backup isn't running), and because its software expects to find "M", I have to reassign the dongle to "M" to get its software to recognize it again. If the software fails to find the device (which happens on a cold reboot) then I know that I have to go change its drive letter ... again ... and rerun the software. This is one of the reasons why I leave my computer powered on all the time. In violation of the USB specifications, some USB devices have no serial number to clearly differentiate themselves. That means when you plug it into a different USB port, Windows won't know if it is the same or different device as already enumerated in the registry hence the change in drive letters. The trick of assigning a drive letter way down the list, like starting from "Z" and progressing backward, often works but not always. That trick sticks the drive letter assignment for awhile but it isn't permanent. If you want to *guarantee* the device gets assigned the same drive letter then you need a drive letter manager that interogates the presentation data (or enumeration data if already recorded in the registry) from the device to clearly identify it. If you don't like the idea of having to pay for a program with tons of features (that you may not want or may not use) and just want something that fixes the drive letters based on their enumeration data then look at: USB Drive Letter Manager http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbdlm_e.html It's freeware (for private and school use only). As I recall, it harkens back to the olden days when you edited an .ini file to configure the program instead of using a pretty GUI. It runs, I believe, as an NT service so it loads before you even login.
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#12
May 27th 12, 09:42 PM
posted to alt.windows7.general
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Changing Drive Letters
"Dave "Crash" Dummy" wrote in message ... pjp wrote: In article , says... On Sat, 26 May 2012 20:33:51 -0400, John Ferrell wrote: I have several USB drives on my Win7 (32) system. When I swap a drive into the mix sometimes the Letter assignments change. I am using Sync Toy for Backups. It requires that the sync pairs be defined by Drive letter. How can I keep the Letters from changing on Drives I have not moved? If you give it a drive letter immediately after your non-removable frives, it should remain the same. I have an external hard drive that is K:, and I tryo to set USB flash drives as J:, but sometimes need to reset them by running: diskmgmt.msc I use a lot of removable devices. I often have a card reader, 3 external hard drives and a couple of flashdrives all connected at same time. What I've found is once you set a device to use a specific drive letter it'll keep using that drive letter provided the device is always connected to the same port. In my experience, they don't even have to be connected to the same port. The drive letter is retained no matter which port I use. I have two USB drives that I use for saving my backup images, one lettered W: and the other X:. I named them in WinXP, and when I plug them into my Win7 laptop, they retain the same drive letters. So not only does it work across ports, it also works across PC's and OS. (or at least it does for me :-) ) -- SC Tom
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#13
May 27th 12, 09:45 PM
posted to alt.windows7.general
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Changing Drive Letters
On Sat, 26 May 2012 18:14:51 -0700, "Gene E. Bloch"
wrote: On Sat, 26 May 2012 20:33:51 -0400, John Ferrell wrote: I have several USB drives on my Win7 (32) system. When I swap a drive into the mix sometimes the Letter assignments change. I am using Sync Toy for Backups. It requires that the sync pairs be defined by Drive letter. How can I keep the Letters from changing on Drives I have not moved? John Ferrell W8CCW Have you been victimized yet by SyncToy's way of dealing with transitions to and from Daylight Saving Time? Or did they finally fix it? Uh Oh! Please tell me more... I was just getting comfortable! John Ferrell W8CCW
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#14
May 27th 12, 11:13 PM
posted to alt.windows7.general
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Changing Drive Letters
On Sun, 27 May 2012 20:00:27 +0200, Steve Hayes wrote:
On Sat, 26 May 2012 20:33:51 -0400, John Ferrell wrote: [quoted text muted] into the mix sometimes the Letter assignments change. I am using Sync Toy for Backups. It requires that the sync pairs be defined by Drive letter. How can I keep the Letters from changing on Drives I have not moved? If you give it a drive letter immediately after your non-removable frives, it should remain the same. It doesn't even have to be immediately after. I have Z: for my CD/DVD drive, and K: for my USB stick, and it has *never* come up as anything but K:, in over two years on Win 7 Enterprise and Win 7 Home Premium (home and work computers). -- Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA http://OakRoadSystems.com Shikata ga nai...
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#15
May 27th 12, 11:13 PM
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Changing Drive Letters
On Sun, 27 May 2012 16:06:48 -0300, pjp wrote:
What I've found is once you set a device to use a specific drive letter it'll keep using that drive letter provided the device is always connected to the same port. I've found it's not necessary to connect to the same port. -- Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA http://OakRoadSystems.com Shikata ga nai...
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