Drive Letter clash (mapped network drives vs physical drives)

[Guest]

My office has a number of mapped network drives for each user which,
unfortunately, start at drive letter F.
Each time a USB device is used on the computer it is also automatically
assigned the drive letter F (presuming that C is hard disk and D and E are
CD/DVD drives). This has to be manually changed from within Disk Management.
Apparently this is as a result of physical drives taking precedent over the
mapped network drives. Is there any workaround for this other than moving the
mapped drive letters further along in the alphabet? - this is not really a
feasible solution at this time.
Any suggestions greatly appreciated

 

[Bob I]

Left to Automatic drive lettering Windows will letter Network drives
starting with Z and working to A. Local drives will be assigned A-Z
automatically. If you wish to assign drive letters manually then you
must plan the lettering yourself. So you will either assign letters so
that the automatic locally assigned letters are left open OR you must
manually assign them. Planning is part of the answer.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the response, but this hasnt really helped me at all.

I agree that planning would have been useful, but I have only been in the
job around 4 months and the network has been up for about 3 years, so not
much I can do about that!

The mapped drives are assigned the same letter on everyones computer.
Windows seems to ignore the fact that some drive letters are in use - I can
change drive letters to one already in use by a mapped drive. Other software
takes into account that these drives are in use. It would appear to be a
windows fault and i was wondering if there was a way around this without
making use of alternate software...

 

[justaguy]

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My office has a number of mapped network drives for each user which,
unfortunately, start at drive letter F.
Each time a USB device is used on the computer it is also
automatically assigned the drive letter F (presuming that C is hard
disk and D and E are CD/DVD drives). This has to be manually changed
from within Disk Management. Apparently this is as a result of
physical drives taking precedent over the mapped network drives. Is
there any workaround for this other than moving the mapped drive
letters further along in the alphabet? - this is not really a feasible
solution at this time. Any suggestions greatly appreciated

We have a similar situation starting at H: (which stood for Home). This
was a leftover from the old Novell DOS network days where using higher
drive letters used up some precious DOS memory, so lower letters were
often used instead of something like Z:.

Using Disk Manager, I usually change the drive letters of my CD/DVD
drives and hard drive partitions other than C: or maybe D: so that they
start at something like F: or above, leaving E: and maybe D: unused. If
you have mapped drives at F:, you would need to go higher to avoid these
as well. This way, a new device will be assigned the unused letter E:
(or D. After it is recognized, you can assign it a different letter,
and then the next time it is plugged in, it will be reassigned that
letter (if possible), so that E: is still free for further new devices to
use. Note that if you plug something into a different USB port, it will
be seen as a different device, and will not always be reassigned the same
letter.

From what I have seen, I think things go something like this:
If you plug a device in before a user is logged in, the network drives
are not mapped yet, so the network drive letters are free for the device
to use, and it does. If a user is logged in and has a network drive
mapped, the letter is in use, and usually a new USB device will not use
it - but, if the device was plugged in and used that letter before, it
will attempt to reuse that letter.

 

[Guest]

hmmm, never thought of it like that

some nice lateral thinking there

seems like a definite possibility for a solution.

Thanks for the suggestion