Drive letter on USB Mass Storage keeps changing

[Guest]

I got a USB HD, a Maxtor, that I perform "Backups" to via Norton Ghost 9.0.
It was originally setup as Drive M. That was the drive assigned after the USB
device was plugged in. All the other letters in between was taken by CD Rom,
DVD's, memory sticks etc.

I took one device out, in drive G:, and after the next reboot, the USB HD
became drive G. taking the place of the device that was taken out. So I went
to to change the Norton job to G from M after error messages indicating "path
not found" was generated.

Then, a reboot took place on Apr 26 and the USB HD becamse Drive L. So I
temporarily made a substitution

subst L: G: (or was it the other way)

It apparently took hold, and apparentlyt nothing was taken by G. Now G and L
is the same drive, and don't have to change any programs.

Any way to keep the drive letter from switching?? The PC's usually
hibernate, and apparently the reboot took place after a software update,
resulting in the changes..

I got TweakUI on the PC. Can I lock in Drive letters checking off the
available drives??

Frank

 

[Uwe Sieber]

Have you installed or updated any software at the time this
effect appeared?
I've seen a report that a software called 'Spyware Doctor'
caused this 'increasing letters' effect.


Greetings from Germany

Uwe

 

[Guest]

Guess we might have installed a PC game, and a Windows update.

I normally hibernate the PC, except on occasions where Windows updates
require a reboot, which occured on 4-27-06, following the update. We also
install "games" for the kids to play, but we don't keep track of when we do
it..

The trouble it seems started when I took a USB flash memory device that
occupied drive G out. At the following reboot, the USB drive took that empty
slot, calling itself Drive G.

For reasons I cannot understand, appears G is now empty, with the USB device
moving up to "drive L" after the reboot following the Windows update.

The problem here is I got my backup plus maybe one or two other programs
writing data to this USB device and I have to go in and change the drives in
the program every time the USB drive decides to call itself something else.

If there could be a way of LOCKING the drive designations in place???

Not a big deal, as I have to periodically check to see if the drive
designations have changed. This time around, I happen to see the error
message Norton 9.0 generated saying the "path was invalid".

Frank

 

[Uwe Sieber]

I've no guess why the letters increase. Anyway, my
USB drive letter manager should be able to fix it:
http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbdlm_e.html

You have to define an USB port depending drive letter
because the default handling is applied only if a
newly attached drive gets the first availlable local
letter. Or you put an USBDLM.INI on the drive.


Greetings from Germany

Uwe

 

[Guest]

Thanks

Looks like what I needed. I'll give it a try, and let you know..

Frank