windows keeps reassigning drive letter.

[THRESHIN]

normally i wouldn't care, but this is a drive that is used primarily over my network....it's becoming a real headache.

system: windows 7 ultimate 64-bit.

drive in question is a 3TB western digital my book external USB drive. i primarily use this drive for media storage and access it over the network with my android media player on my tv. i have to set up the paths in xbmc, so it's becoming very irritating to have the drive letter change for no reason!

drive has been assigned to H manually though disk management. stays there for a while, then decides to change to I for....no apparent reason? just something to do i guess?

strangely, when i try to reset it back to H there is no H option for drive letter assignment as if something is hogging it up.

any thoughts? btw if i try to access H drive, i get 'insert removable disk into H drive' message....

no known issues with virus infection, malware, etc. i currently use nod32 64-bit fully updated. i have no other issues with my system.

thanks.

 

[Demon10000]

I think I'd start with firmware for your motherboard and USB drivers (chipset drivers) as they're pretty easy to update.

It sounds like the drive is "disappearing" at some point, but not doing so cleanly. Then the USB subsystem recognizes it's there and assigns it a new drive letter.


Is the USB drive powered? Do you have lots of things plugged into it? It might be a USB power issue...

 

[Spidey329]

As Demon stated, check for the root cause. Try a different port.

Fixes could be:
- Try USBDLM to force the letter to the driveID. It's a nice little utility.http://www.thedave.ca/geek/usb-drive-letters-wont-stay-put/

- Create a mount path (like a symlink) on another drives (fixed, like C) folder. Make the path go to the drive ID. For example, C:\mymount . The "mymount" folder would link to the driveID\root, so browsing to that folder would show the drives contents. Sharing "mymount" would be just like sharing the drive, sans the letter.

 

[THRESHIN]

i'll give it a shot, but much of this is taken care of.

my system is an old core2 e8400....so mainboard is an old gigabyte P35-DS3L. need to upgrade soon

the BIOS has been fully updated and i think gigabyte has abandoned doing more updates long ago.

drive is external powered, so shouldn't be any issues there. however, i do remember having an issue with the drive when i got it. can't remember what exactly was happening, but i had to set the BIOS not to detect USB drives. i was having some unusual boot issues, turning that off solved it. windows detects the drive immediately on startup. could - likely - be part of the problem, but i don't have a choice here. its a bug workaround.

i'll give this USBDLM thing a look. wasn't aware it existed. thanks