Locking a Drive Letter

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jokerswild

jokerswild

Chief Bottle Washer
Feb 11, 2007
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Elkhart, IN
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I read on here somewhere and can't find it now that there is a way to make sure when a drive is connected to a USB port that it always comes up as say E Drive no matter what other devices might be connected before hand.

Anybody know how to do that in Vista?

BTW so far I may have to eat every word I ever sad ill about Vista... so far me likes.
 
It's easy enough to change it Rob, but I don't believe you can "lock" a drive letter on a USB port...

Windows assigns them dynamically on its own. There may be some 3rd party utilities that do it though, but I would doubt they would be very reliable under Vista or Win7.

Just set a shortcut to Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Computer Management, and you can change them to whatever you want (provided the letter is not already taken by something else).
 
What you can do is name a drive if you have multiple external USB drives, I have a Simpletech 500GB drive and when I plug it into the USB port it comes up as SignatureMini(D:) in My Computer. I don't know if this helps?

Another thing, if you want it to come up as D: all the time for example, you need to plug it in first. E: is the DVD/CD drive so the next drive you plug in will be F:.

You can also assign drive letters when partitioning a drive.
 
huh... I could have sworn someone here knew of a way to do it. I normally would start up with the drive already connected and turned on I just wanted to avoid problems later should I be a dumb ass and forget to turn it on and have some other storage device connected and have it take the drive letter from me and forceing me to either reboot or do some Vista gymnastics to get it straight again.
 
Not that simple Rob...

The USB bus is dynamically allocated. If you start Vista up with everything attached to the same ports, every time -- you will get the same drive letters.

It will remember them in the hive (the registry for you non programmers). It can rewrite those entries anytime it sees fit though. That's the caveat.

Never count on a drive letter on the USB bus, unless everything is plugged in exactly the same way, before every boot... :sqwink:
 
BTW, if ya wanna have some fun with somebody, this also works with internal drives (PnP is the name of the game).


Unplug their extra internal drives, whether HDD, CD, DVD, etc. Reboot the computer. Windows will reassign the drive letters. Then turn it off, and plug them back in the way they were before.

Reboot it.

They will generally have different drive letters, and many things will cease to function :sqlaugh:


I just heard that BTW, not something I have first hand knowledge of... :sqwink:
 
there is a freeware program that can do that for you.....

sorry this one is $30 but i'll find the freeware one as I know I have it here some place lol

http://www.brothersoft.com/easy-drive-lock-54904.html

my brain is a mess first thing in the morning so check again later on and the freeware one should be there (or attached if its small)
 
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