How to make an external HDD keep the same drive letter in Vista?

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Klob

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Oct 15, 2008
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I remember in Win9x I could assign a permanent drive letter to a HDD. I can't find any such option in Vista and it sometimes causes me an issue where the external HDD letter changes because I had more than one external HDD or thumb drive connected. That makes media players lose the drive letter it is monitoring and have to rescan the library with the new drive letter. I keep all my MP3s on an external HDD and a few times now I have had to rescan the library into foobar because of this above issue.
 
I set my drive to a letter away from the usual C,D,E and it retains the letter each time I connect it. I use drive letter X, and then back up my data with SyncToy on several computers. Each one is set to use letter X, and I don't have any issues.
 
you find it under computer management -> stoage section and then right click on partition and choose the option to change drive letter and path
 
Yes, I know how to change the drive letter already but in Win9x you could make it permanent so no other drive would take it over. There is no such option in Vista. I guess making it X is a good compromise as no other USB HDD will try to take that letter automatically. Although setting all external HDDs to X is not good because then if both are connected at the same time they will conflict, no?

Thanks for the link to that USB software. I see that does allow you to reserve a drive letter which is what I want.
 
There were a lot of things you could do in Win9x that no good operating system would ever let you do. In general, if you expect XP/Vista/7 to do everything like Win9x, you're in for a world of disappointment.
 
It was a good feature and should have stayed. You know? It doesn't matter what people post about here there is always some zealot who will come along and defend it no matter how stupid a decision it was.
 
Klob said:
Yes, I know how to change the drive letter already but in Win9x you could make it permanent so no other drive would take it over. There is no such option in Vista. I guess making it X is a good compromise as no other USB HDD will try to take that letter automatically. Although setting all external HDDs to X is not good because then if both are connected at the same time they will conflict, no?

Thanks for the link to that USB software. I see that does allow you to reserve a drive letter which is what I want.
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lol all of my USB drives (3 of them) have perminately assigned drive letters in vista

One is G another is H and another is M. it does not matter if 1 2 or 3 are in use
 
Why are you laughing like a clown? There is no option in Vista to make a USB HDD keep a specific drive letter. If there was then that USB Drive Letter Manager software nick8571 posted a link to would never have been needed to be coded in the first place.
 
Klob said:
Why are you laughing like a clown? There is no option in Vista to make a USB HDD keep a specific drive letter. If there was then that USB Drive Letter Manager software nick8571 posted a link to would never have been needed to be coded in the first place.
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Prolly because they have not run into your issue. If you manually assign them drive letters like H:, K:, L: and up they stay, as long as you do not add enough drives at one time to reach those letters. A lot of people might not notice the sometimes annoying way Windows Xp and Vista handle the assignments.
 
Klob said:
There is no option in Vista to make a USB HDD keep a specific drive letter.
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Instead of reverting to your old ways, why not just read what people are trying to tell you? If you manually assign a drive letter to a USB drive, it will stick.
 
DeaconFrost said:
Instead of reverting to your old ways, why not just read what people are trying to tell you? If you manually assign a drive letter to a USB drive, it will stick.
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This is new... I have USBDLM to hold my drive letters but if I don't need it then I will get rid of it...
 
DeaconFrost said:
Instead of reverting to your old ways, why not just read what people are trying to tell you? If you manually assign a drive letter to a USB drive, it will stick.
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Manually assigning a letter is no different than the letter Windows has already assigned to it. You are just giving it a different letter to use. Now, if I assign it a high enough letter that no other device will try to use the same letter then that is a different matter. Or I could just use that software to make the letter permanent. Once again, if there was no issues then that USB drive management software would never have been created in the first place. If you believe the software was created out of ignorance then I suggest you email the author of the software and take it up with him. My guess though is that you are wrong and not him.
 
Klob said:
Once again, if there was no issues then that USB drive management software would never have been created in the first place.
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Do you ever think something through before you get cocky? I doubt it, because your logic falls apart rather quickly. Going by your logic, once Wordpad and Notepad were created, there would never be a need for anything more to be created.

And since you like to repeat yourself, so will I. This "problem" only seems to affect you....not the rest of us. Saying that it is cleary a problem for many, and that's why software was created is simply assinine. Not ever piece of software is created to fill a void. But then again, you know everything, so you knew that already. :rolleyes:
 
Sovereign said:
This is new... I have USBDLM to hold my drive letters but if I don't need it then I will get rid of it...
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It's been this way for every versions of Windows I've used with an external USB drive since Windows 2000. I use X or S for my external drives, and they stick on the same computers. If I connect the drive to a new computer, I'll have to manually move it there once, but it sticks after that. This works the same with card readers as well. Once I reassign the latters to higher ones, away from any mapped drives, they stick as well.
 
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