USB drive Recycle Bin and System Restore settings won't stay put

[Opinicus]

Using WinXP Home with all patches, updates, etc in place.

I have two USB drives (Pockeys: one 60 gig the other 40 gig) that I use to
back up My Documents and some other folders every Sunday. Every time I
attach one of these drives Windows turns on the Recycle Bin and System
Restore even though I had previously turned them off. (Each drive has been
assigned a unique letter and is always attached to the same USB port.)
Sometimes I have to turn the Recycle Bin off two or three times to make its
stick for a given session but even still, the next time I attach the drive,
it's turned back on again. A similar thing happens with my 6 gig Western
Digital pocket drive but strangely enough not with my SanDisk Cruzer or my
wife's Corsair flash drives. Why the difference in behavior and how can I
turn the Recycle Bin and System Restore off permanently on these devices?

 

[Bert Kinney]

Hi Bob,

In WindowsXP, System Restore was designed to automount and monitor all
drives/partitions it sees. Stopping monitoring of internal hard drives is easy
and straight forward. External drives are another issue. When an external and
some flash drives are disconnect then connected System Restore will restart
monitoring that drive.

A possible work around is to assign a permanent drive letter (the higher in the
alphabet the better) to the external drive via Disk Management. To access Disk
Management, go to Start - Run and type diskmgmt.msc then press enter.

Right-click a partition, logical drive, or volume, and then click Change Drive
Letter and Paths.

Do one of the following:

1. To assign a drive letter, click Add, click the drive letter you want to use,
and then click OK.

2. To modify a drive letter, click it, click Change, click the drive letter you
want to use, and then click OK.

Reboot the system. Open System Restore and stop monitoring that drive. This
should keep System Restore from monitoring that drive, but not always.