USB flash drive takes drive letter away from a Local Disk

[Guest]

We have a new PC here at work (gov. of Canada facility; op. & maint.
contracted to our private company) running Win XP Pro. Some proprietary
software on this PC needs to access local disks D and E. There is only 1
disk partition, so we have mapped shared folders to drives D and E (actual
folders/files exist locally on drive C).
Whenever we connect a USB flash drive, digital camera, or other USB device,
Windows tries to map it to drive D. In Explorer, the drive label changes
from "Local Disk" to "KINGSTON" (or whatever), but upon viewing the contents
of drive D, we only see the files/folders of the previously mapped drive. No
other Removable drive appears in Explorer.
When we remove the USB device, drive D disappears from Explorer, but we can
still access it via command prompt.
We have no such drive-mapping problems on several Win 2k machines.
How do we get Win XP to map USB devices to drive G or higher letters?

 

[Uwe Sieber]

We have a new PC here at work (gov. of Canada facility; op. & maint.
contracted to our private company) running Win XP Pro. Some proprietary
software on this PC needs to access local disks D and E. There is only 1
disk partition, so we have mapped shared folders to drives D and E (actual
folders/files exist locally on drive C).
Whenever we connect a USB flash drive, digital camera, or other USB device,
Windows tries to map it to drive D. In Explorer, the drive label changes
from "Local Disk" to "KINGSTON" (or whatever), but upon viewing the contents
of drive D, we only see the files/folders of the previously mapped drive. No
other Removable drive appears in Explorer.
When we remove the USB device, drive D disappears from Explorer, but we can
still access it via command prompt.
We have no such drive-mapping problems on several Win 2k machines.
How do we get Win XP to map USB devices to drive G or higher letters?

A known problem of XP, W2K and Vista do better.
XP just ignores the usage of drive letters for Subst and
network drives. Read more at my page:
http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbtrouble_e.html

If its about one single USB drive only then you can
change its drive letter to a different one in the Windows
disk management console, XP will remember this.
But it stores exactely one assignment per drive and per letter.

For many drives my USB drive letter manager is a solution:
http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbdlm_e.html


Greetings from Germany

Uwe