External Drives...

[ME]

Two questions: 1. Under disk management, I marked one of my drives 'active'.
What does that mean and how do I mark it as not active, as in revert it back
to whatever state it was in before - or do I care? 2. This one has been a
major annoyance. No matter which USB slot I plug it into or which drive I
plug in first, one of my external hard drives always sets to 'J' when I need
it permanently 'I'. So annoying! As is, I keep having to change the drive
letters and paths each time - 'I' to 'J' and 'J' to 'I' What gives?!
Apparently my computer has marked the drive permanently 'J'. How can I make
it so it's always 'I'? And the monkey presses the 'Post' button... Thanks!

 

[Pegasus [MVP]]

Two questions: 1. Under disk management, I marked one of my drives
'active'.
What does that mean and how do I mark it as not active, as in revert it
back
to whatever state it was in before - or do I care? 2. This one has been a
major annoyance. No matter which USB slot I plug it into or which drive I
plug in first, one of my external hard drives always sets to 'J' when I
need
it permanently 'I'. So annoying! As is, I keep having to change the
drive
letters and paths each time - 'I' to 'J' and 'J' to 'I' What gives?!
Apparently my computer has marked the drive permanently 'J'. How can I
make
it so it's always 'I'? And the monkey presses the 'Post' button...
Thanks!

It's not a "drive" that is marked active but a "partition". Windows will
boot off the active primary partition on the primary master disk. If there
is no active partition then it will not boot. On other disks, the "active"
attribute has no effect. You could remove this attribute with the Console
utility "diskpart.exe" but unless you are experienced with such commands I
recommend you leave it alone.

I suspect you keep getting drive J: instead of drive I: because drive I:
refers to a remembered share connection. If so then you can avoid the
problem by removing the remembered connection as per the steps below. A far
simpler method would be to just accept the letter J: as it is. If the shoe
fits, wear it!

Removing a remembered connection:
1. Open a Command Prompt.
2. Type the following commands:
net use /persistent:no
net use * /del /yes