WOT: drive letters

RZ wrote on 3/19/2014, 12:17 PM

Good folks,

I have a bunch of USB external drives connected to my computer. One is dedicated to pictures, the other to videos and so on. When I boot up, sometimes, not all drives are recognized and the drive letter changes: drive L becomes drive R. The programs then can't refer to the original media. Lately happened to Lightroom: I was in the process of making a Photobook from drive L, but the same drive has a new letter.

What is the solution to the problem? Is there a way to LOCK the letter to a particular drive? Thanks

RZ

Comments

videoITguy wrote on 3/19/2014, 12:47 PM

yes and no - it depends on a whole lot of things. Begin with your OS version, then depends on your chipset, supporting SUCCESSFUL? USB3 and UsB2 concurrent at boot? what is your drive/partition configuration of your locked in internal drives? Are you using UEFI or Bios? How many drive controllers are you working with at boot - Marvell and Intel? or ?

amendegw wrote on 3/19/2014, 12:54 PM

You can try Disk Management It's not bullet proof as sometimes another removable drive will grab the first drive's letter. It can also be used to re-assign your Lightroom Drive to L:

...Jerry

Kit wrote on 3/19/2014, 3:36 PM

I use USBDLM - USB Drive Letter Manager for Windows. It works very well. It can lock letters to particular drives or to particular ports.

videoITguy wrote on 3/19/2014, 3:55 PM

If anyone here wishes to understand why this is not a trivial task on the behalf of programming, check the bug fix documentations for the German made program USBDLM software. Also note the number of apps written on behalf of the OS part of the equation in this program.

Would like to hear reports from users other than german computer installations of what they run into - particularly newer chipset motherboards with handling cold boots of drives on USB2 and USB3 concurrent.

rmack350 wrote on 3/19/2014, 4:59 PM

Jerry's method works reasonably well IF you start assigning letters at "Z:" and work backwards. That way these drives never conflict with randomly attached thumb drives that get their letters assigned from the first available choice.

Also, physically mark the drive with the drive letter.

Rob

videoITguy wrote on 3/19/2014, 5:18 PM

Wisdom about temp drive assignments to begin with drive letter J, R, or Z actually has no basis for the variability in assignment outcomes. Read the german software bug fix doc so you understand this better.

rmack350 wrote on 3/19/2014, 5:35 PM

Assigning letters to removable drives from the top (Z) down works consistently for me. I take the drives from work to home and use them across computers without mishap, and have been doing it this way for about ten years. I even boot these systems with the drive attached. Never a problem (although I think I need to manually make the assignments on each PC).

The reason I do it this way is that I had the same problem with removable media getting random drive letters, and software not being able to find files.

This approach doesn't work for certain things. I don't think it'll work if you want to boot off the removable media (but that wasn't the question anyway) and the letter assignment doesn't persist if you're attaching the media to random computers, but it works fine on computers you can make the letter assignment on.

Rob

amendegw wrote on 3/19/2014, 5:49 PM

[I]"The programs then can't refer to the original media. Lately happened to Lightroom: I was in the process of making a Photobook from drive L, but the same drive has a new letter.[/I]I prefer to reassign the drive letter but one could also "Find Missing Folder" in Lightroom (Library Module).

...Jerry

videoITguy wrote on 3/19/2014, 6:25 PM

What most people are missing is what I perceive the OP's first post to be about is relative drive path assignment per program call.
Vegas and DVDAPro will have these issues.

1) Example of non-relative call
I create a doc on drive K, but drive is assinged letter M on next boot. Then I use an open word document command from program and find it on drive M. This is likely to be simple and is not a difficult thing to work with.

2) Example of a relative call with a program reassign possible. This is an example I gather from the comment above about Lightroom. There is a procedure that can be established to bring the file up even though the relative call is important to the process.

3) Example of a troublesome relative call is like a VegasPro project remembering the location for a video stream related to an audio stream in a group sync within a project file. This is the hardest type of call to reassign because the program seeks the original drive path.

Kit wrote on 3/19/2014, 6:58 PM

With USBDLM you can avoid those problems. I like to use Q for my Thumb Drives and U for my Backup Hard Drives. Regardless of which Thumb Drive I put into my PC it always gets assigned the letter Q. Same goes for my backup drives they always get the letter U.

RZ wrote on 3/20/2014, 12:10 AM

You guys are awesome. I will look into recommendations in this post in the next day or so. Many many thanks.

RZ

Steve Mann wrote on 3/20/2014, 12:37 AM

You guys want to do things the hard way. (Is this an Adobe forum by mistake?)

Here (again) is a batch file I wrote to change the drive letter of any drive to whatever you want. You can edit it in a text editor to change the destination drive.

http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1421565/Make_Drive_B.bat

Just drop this bat file into your external drive root and run it, and *poof* your drive is now drive B: (Or whatever drive letter you want to change it to by editing the batch file. Just change this line: SET NEWDRIVE=B)

flyingski wrote on 3/20/2014, 2:32 AM

What are your system specs? I've been having a similar problem since a recent upgrade with an Asus motherboard. It involves front panel USB slots but is random. I've tried assigning letters without much luck. Like you it's driving me nuts.

Kit wrote on 3/20/2014, 2:54 AM

I think it is easier to use USBDLM than keep editing and running a batch file.

craftech wrote on 3/20/2014, 8:13 AM

A couple of things RZ:

1. Are the external drives formatted as Basic or Dynamic? They should be formatted as Basic if you move them from computer to computer.

2. Did you name the drives so you can find them by name if the letters change?

3. Did you assign drive letters using Disk Management as Jerry pointed out above?

John

SecondWind-SK wrote on 3/20/2014, 12:24 PM

Steve, Your batch file sounds really useful; however, I'm reluctant to download a BAT file. Could you make the file available as a text file? Thanks.

RZ wrote on 3/20/2014, 1:47 PM

A couple of things RZ:

1. Are the external drives formatted as Basic or Dynamic? They should be formatted as Basic if you move them from computer to computer.
------------------------------------

The drives are connected to a single computer.
No, I did not get a chance to rename the drives yet: pretty busy at my day job. Plan to do this coming weekend. Thanks all.

RZ

PeterDuke wrote on 3/20/2014, 8:12 PM

SecondWind

Right-click on the link and choose save-as. Change or add a txt extension to make it a text file.

Steve Mann wrote on 3/20/2014, 11:05 PM

@ECHO OFF
:: CURDRIVE.BAT
::
:: Substitutes CURDRIVE with NEWDRIVE
::
SET NEWDRIVE=B
::
SET CURDRIVE=
CD | CHOICE /C:ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ > NUL
IF ERRORLEVEL 1 SET CURDRIVE=A
IF ERRORLEVEL 2 SET CURDRIVE=B
IF ERRORLEVEL 3 SET CURDRIVE=C
IF ERRORLEVEL 4 SET CURDRIVE=D
IF ERRORLEVEL 5 SET CURDRIVE=E
IF ERRORLEVEL 6 SET CURDRIVE=F
IF ERRORLEVEL 7 SET CURDRIVE=G
IF ERRORLEVEL 8 SET CURDRIVE=H
IF ERRORLEVEL 9 SET CURDRIVE=I
IF ERRORLEVEL 10 SET CURDRIVE=J
IF ERRORLEVEL 11 SET CURDRIVE=K
IF ERRORLEVEL 12 SET CURDRIVE=L
IF ERRORLEVEL 13 SET CURDRIVE=M
IF ERRORLEVEL 14 SET CURDRIVE=N
IF ERRORLEVEL 15 SET CURDRIVE=O
IF ERRORLEVEL 16 SET CURDRIVE=P
IF ERRORLEVEL 17 SET CURDRIVE=Q
IF ERRORLEVEL 18 SET CURDRIVE=R
IF ERRORLEVEL 19 SET CURDRIVE=S
IF ERRORLEVEL 20 SET CURDRIVE=T
IF ERRORLEVEL 21 SET CURDRIVE=U
IF ERRORLEVEL 22 SET CURDRIVE=V
IF ERRORLEVEL 23 SET CURDRIVE=W
IF ERRORLEVEL 24 SET CURDRIVE=X
IF ERRORLEVEL 25 SET CURDRIVE=Y
IF ERRORLEVEL 26 SET CURDRIVE=Z
IF "%CURDRIVE%"=="" ECHO Error checking current drive
IF NOT "%CURDRIVE%"=="" ECHO Current drive is %CURDRIVE%:

subst %NEWDRIVE%: /d
subst %NEWDRIVE%: %CURDRIVE%: