Drive Letter Assignments - USB devices (renumerating, re-initialising)

[nicole098]

Hi all,

We have a situation where many of our reseachers use external hard
drives to analyse images of the eye.


First of all i'll get to my question.. Can Windows be told through
registry hack or similar.. to 'renumerate' (i think this is the term)
all drives or USB devices on login?


The problem we are experiencing is as follows..
Sometimes when a device a hard drive or USB disk is plugged in, the
device is assigned the same letter of our Intranet Drive (G). Or at
least this is what Windows attempts to do, but of course it isn't
successful and the USB device becomes un-accesible.


Also, Windows remembers a device's letter assignment from when it was
last used (last powered-on). This is annoying because when a user
switches from 'grading station' (just an XP computer), they can find
their drives have been assigned different letters.
I am aware of beging able to manually assign drive letters through
Computer Management, but of course this is not ideal, and not available

to Users who aren't given Administrator access (avoid avoid avoid).


All comptuers involved being identical, it would be great if things
would work on a first plugged-in, first available letter assigned
principal.


Its almost like Windows caches the letter assignments of the drives
from when they were first used.


I'm guessing this is a common predicament for people but through my
googling I haven't been able to pinpoint the topic, Really appreciate
any pearls of wisdom here!


nilo

 

[Uwe Sieber]

Hi all,

Hi Nicole

We have a situation where many of our reseachers use external hard
drives to analyse images of the eye.

First of all i'll get to my question.. Can Windows be told through
registry hack or similar.. to 'renumerate' (i think this is the term)
all drives or USB devices on login?

No documented registry hack. Maybe it's possible to remove
some entries from the registry whenever Windows starts up,
but this would require some research...

The problem we are experiencing is as follows..
Sometimes when a device a hard drive or USB disk is plugged in, the
device is assigned the same letter of our Intranet Drive (G). Or at
least this is what Windows attempts to do, but of course it isn't
successful and the USB device becomes un-accesible.

It's successful in view of Windows but the drive is hidden then
behind the network share. The drive becomes visible as soon as
the share is removed.

I've been unhappy with this 'first free' assignment and wrote
a little Windows service, the USB drive letter manager - USBDLM:
http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbdlm_e.html
You can define new default letters or a letter per USB port.

If you are in a university then it's free.


Geetings from Germany

Uwe

 

[nilo]

Hi Uwe,

Just another addition to my post, the developer from Singapore that was
contracted to build a database, statically mapped access to the
databases to this External HDD, when the letter assignments changed,
aren't visible for whatever reason it created problems....

I've had a good look at your custom 'usb disk service' page and it is
very impressive! I let a university it forum participant know about
it after they just happened to have posted the issue to the forum..
Always good to share information, thanks!

Thanks for your time and hopefully I can put your smart manager to good
use soon, i'll keep everybody posted.