NOT displaying/showing drive letters of USB/removable media partitions in WinExplorer ?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Uwe Sieber
  • Start date Start date
U

Uwe Sieber

Thommy said:
On a new computer system with pre-installed WinXP I can see a lot of drive letters
in Windows Explorer for all USB and removable drives. Since this computer has
4 USB drives and 1 for a Memory Stick there are always 5 drive letters

with no contents (No external USB Stick or Memory card is currently plugged in).

I don't want to see all these drive letters. Is there a way to let them only appear
when a card/stick is plugged in ?
Click to expand...


No. But you can remove the letters and access the slots
thru folders on an NTFS formatted drive.

Create a base folder for the card reader like
C:\CardReader

Then create there on folder for each slot of the reader.
C:\CardReader\CompactFlash
C:\CardReader\SD_MMC
C:\CardReader\MemStick
C:\CardReader\SmartMedia

The change the Letters to these folders:

Right-click 'My Computer' -> 'Manage', select
'Disk Management', right-click on the drive ->
'Change Drive Letter and Paths...',
click 'Change'...

But have to know which slot has which letter to
change them to the folder with the right name...


There is a faster way. I've written a small commandline
tool that simplifies the process described above.
http://www.uwe-sieber.de/files/mscr2folder.zip
(Multi Slot Card Reader to folder)

Create the folder C:\CardReader, then open a command
prompt, change to folder where you have unzipped the
MSCR2Folder.EXE too and enter
MSCR2Folder E: C:\CardReader

E: is one of the letters currently assingned to the
multislot card reader - no matter which one.

It creates then one sub folder for each slot using their
device names. Better readers have 'talking' names like
'USB2.0 CF_MD', 'USB2.0 SD_MMC' and so on. Slots of junk
readers have all the same, non talking name like 'USB USB',
'Generic USB', 'General Flash Disk'. MSCR2Folder adds
numbers then.


Greetings from Germany

Uwe
 
On a new computer system with pre-installed WinXP I can see a lot of drive letters
in Windows Explorer for all USB and removable drives. Since this computer has
4 USB drives and 1 for a Memory Stick there are always 5 drive letters

E:, F:, G:, H:, I:

with no contents (No external USB Stick or Memory card is currently plugged in).

I don't want to see all these drive letters. Is there a way to let them only appear
when a card/stick is plugged in ?

Thommy
 
You must have a very special driver for the USB drives. With the standard
driver the letter would not show until connected. The memory stick sockets
differ of course, I see them all the time and I'd rather not see them when no
stick is attached!
 
But you could create a searchpath on your c: via disk manager and then delete
the letter designation. I just now did so with my SD-socket, which was named
F:. I made it c:\memories\SD, plugged in a stick and it worked. Nota bene, it
might not work with some special programs for reading photographic data or
so. Has anybody tried it?
 
But you will of course never see a letter even if you plug in a stick. But
you might create a convenient shortcut for it somewhere where it would not
disturb as much...
 
Back
Top