Hi, Ric.
WinXP wakes up in a new world each time we reboot - so far as "drive"
letters are concerned. If your flash drive is plugged in, it might become
Drive G: (for example). On the next boot, if the flash drive is missing,
the DVD drive might move up and take the G: letter. This can get VERY
confusing!!
Fortunately, WinXP provides Disk Management, a tool to manage all our
"drives", including hard drive volumes, CD/DVD drives, USB "flash" drives,
network drives, and even digital cameras or card readers that might take
"drive" letters and be visible in My Computer. Many users, even computer
veterans, have not yet found Disk Management. One way to it is to type at
the Run prompt: diskmgmt.msc
In Disk Management, we can create partitions, format them, delete them - and
assign "drive" letters. If we assign letters here, WinXP will attempt to
remember our choices and will reserve those letters, even if we boot with
some of the devices unplugged. We can't do this for the System Partition
(typically C
or the Boot Volume (also C: in many systems), but we can for
the others.
Go into Disk Management and assign the drive letter you want to each device.
It's quite acceptable to skip around in the alphabet and pick mnemonic
letters to help you remember: V: for DVD? F: for Flash drive? R: for
memory card Reader? It's up to you. But I like to keep the first several
letters reserved for HD volumes.
Also note that we can right-click on a removable device (such as a flash
drive) in Drive Management and then click Properties. On the Policies tab,
we can choose between Optimize for quick removal and Optimize for
performance.
RC
