Permanently assigning drive letter to an external hard drive

[Anne1432]

I have a Gateway laptop running XP Media Edition. I use a 250GB ext HD for my
iTunes and other programs I do not want to bog down my laptop. I sometimes
need to remove the ext. HD (via safe removal). The problem arises when I
reconnect the HD and the drive letter has changed. This messes up my short
cuts and causes problems with software updates, specifically iTunes. My
question therefore is, can I permanently assign a drive letter for my ext.
HD? And if so, how?
Thanks!

 

[Leonard Grey]

By design, Windows XP assigns the next available drive letter to storage
devices so, as you have found, you cannot permanently designate a drive
letter.

There are work-arounds for this common situation (which was not common
when XP was being designed.) I'll present two work-arounds here.

The method I use is to dispense with drive letters altogether and use
NTFS mount points instead. While you won't get a drive letter, you will
have a fixed path to your device which will not change and which can be
substituted for a drive letter in many if not most applications. You can
find a fuller explanation here:

http://aumha.net/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=28888&start=0

Another very effective method, one that will allow you to choose a drive
letter, is Uwe Sieber's USBDLM, a Windows service that gives control
over Window's drive letter assignment for USB drives. You can find it here:

http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbdlm_e.html