usb drive conflicting with mapped network drive

[Guest]

At work I have several people who are using those little USB drives. When
they are plugged in they are getting assigned to the first drive letter after
the harddrives, which is mapped as a network drive. There are no errors and
if I go to Disk Management I have two devices with the same drive letter. I
can change the drive letter of the USB device, but that only works on one
machine and as long as they plug the USB device into the same USB hole. I
have hundreds of computers where is could be an issue.

Is there a way to hardcode XP as to the next available drive letter is can
assign?

Is there an autorun I can but on USB drives so they can assign themselves a
consistent drive letter?

Any other suggestions?

Thanks

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

Of course, you can change the netdrive letter, or plug in the USB after the
boot. Also, there is a way to re-assign the drive letter for the USB drive
in DISKMGMT.MSC (rightclick the drive icon) Unfortunately, XP cannot change
the drive letter from a script. (the WMI Win32_Volume object is not
available in XP and below)

--changedrive.vbs--
strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" &
"{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
Set colVolumes = objWMIService.ExecQuery("Select * from Win32_Volume Where
Name = 'Q:\\' ")
For Each objVolume in colVolumes
objVolume.DriveLetter = "Z:"
objVolume.Put_
Next
--cut--

..