Seagate's external drives 300GB, 400GB works excellent for me. Easy to switch to another PC. They appear to be just as fast as my internal drives. I capture video to them directly.

I use alot of external hard drive storage enclosures and hard drives and have run into the same problem with the drive letters on occasion. Here is how to fix it:

1. Insert the drive with the letter problem
2. Right Click "My Computer"
3. Click "Manage"
4 Click "Storage"
5. Click "Disk Management"
6. Right Click the Drive with the "Letter Problem"
7. Choose "Rename" and assign the drive a new letter

The drive will now be recognized properly with the new letter.

Hope this helps!

Jay Mitchell
SCVUG

Just to add a drop more detail: If, for some reason, the drive letter you want is already being used by another drive, you need to change the other drive's letter to something else first (otherwise you won't be allowed to reuse the existing drive letter). And before you do THAT: just make sure there's no software running that's utilizing any of the drive letters you're changing.

Very helpful.
I'll try that process and see if I can un-confuse the situation.

Jay,---followed those instructions.
Thanks very much.
Works to a point.
But when we get to "Change Drive Letter and Paths" and I try to change "E" to "F" and vise versa,---the letters are already taken.
Maybe the problem is the way I'm using to rename.
Couldn't fine "Rename" as specifed in your instructions, so using "Change Drive Letter and Paths"
Oh,---and I hit "mark partition as active on the "F" (removable) drive by mistake. It's greyed out,---can I reverse?

Sherman,

See my note above. If you're trying to swap E and F, you need to do something like:
Change F to, say, X
Change E to F
Change X to E

(just like trying to swap two programming variables)

I get it.
Sort of like a shell game.
I'll give it awhirl.
And thanks.

Changed internal drive "F" to "X" successfully.
But when I attempt to change letter on "E" drive to "F" window pops up telling me "This volume contains a pagefile.

Well... first: are you sure you want to move drive E? I just used E and F in my example, but I thought your setup was more like swapping F and G. (move G to X, move F to G, move X to F). That being said...

if there's a pagefile on E, chances are that E has been E for a long time (maybe even when you set up the OS), and that Windows has happily set up a pagefile there. If this is your "system" drive (in other words, Windows is located in E:\Windows), you don't want to really mess with E. At all.

However, if E really is just some data storage drive, and you want to rename it, first get rid of the paging file. WARNING: MAKE SURE THIS IS REALLY WHAT YOU WANT TO DO!

- right click My Computer and choose Properties...
- go to the Advanced tab. In the Performance box, click Settings
- You'll see a Performance Options dialog box. Click the Advanced tab.
- In the Virtual Memory box, click Change
- You'll see a Virtual Memory dialog box. In the drive list, select E: Then select the radio button near the bottom of the dialog box labeled No Paging File. (NOTE: I don't believe it will let you remove E's paging file if it is the ONLY paging file. I could be wrong, but I don't feel like tossing my paging file to find out).
Then click a bunch of OK's and you'll probably need to reboot.

Again, it's not clear to me you really want to be renaming E. Based on your original note, you mentioned F and G (that'll teach me to write better examples!).

David

David,
You've been such a great help here.
But at the risk of stretching your patience,----

Yes, "E" , the real "E" is not OS drive,---that's "C".
So I've got "E" assigned to the real "E" drive and "F" assigned the real "F" drive,---the removable hard drive.
Whick brings us to "G".
Now I have been using "G" a 250 GB drive as a back up for OS stuff.
Now it is time to put it to work.
So,---I need to erase that drive.
And reformat, if that's the right term, it as "G" drive so machine recognises it as such.

Just curious: through drive-letter juggling, did you get E and F back to how you want them? And are you now just left with a G drive that needs stay a G drive but with reformatting?

If all you want to do at this point is add that drive to your pool of video-storage / work drives, and keep it as G, there's really nothing to do but delete everything on the drive, right? If on the other hand, you want to really baptize this guy, you'll need to reformat (and then you get to assign a drive letter to it, whether it's G or any other available drive letter). Reformatting gives you the chance of, say, switching to NTFS (and it's better to do so at format time vs. conversion, due to some fragmentation of some unerlying disk structures).

If 've got this wrong, you should probably send me your complete list of drives (from Disk Manager), along with which ones you want to swap, etc. We can then work this out.

David,

This is how it reads from Disc anagement.
Also have swappable (F) drive that's about full

Vol Layout Type File System Status Capacity Free %free

(C ) Partition Basic NTFS Healthy (System) 74.52 63.78 85%
(G) Partition Basic NTFS Healthy (Active) 186.31 152.79 82%
New Volume(E) Simple Dynamic NTFS Healthy 223.58 23.95 10%

All say "NO" for fault tolerance.

I have tried removable IDE trays that insert into a drive bay in the case, a USB2, and an IEEE1394 external drive case, all using the same HD moved from one to the other.

I then used a Hitachi speed test program to rate the read and write speeds of the various setups:

IDE Removable trays, a rating of 48
1394, a rating of 29
USB2, a rating of 26.

I'm sticking with the removable ide trays.

Sherman -

Check your email.