USB Removale storage and drive letters

[Steve N.]

I've run across these two similar problems a couple of times with XP Pro.

1. Plug in a USB storage device, hardware is recognized but no drive
letter associated with it. Have to go into Storage Management and assign
a letter, then it's good `till next time.

2. Plug in a USB storage device, hardware is recognized a drive letter
is mapped according to Storage Management, but the letter is already
being used by a mapped network share, have to re-assign a different
drive letter and then it's good `till next try.

Steve

 

[Thorsten Matzner]

I've run across these two similar problems a couple of times with XP Pro.

1. Plug in a USB storage device, hardware is recognized but no drive
letter associated with it. Have to go into Storage Management and assign
a letter, then it's good `till next time.

Make sure that you are using the "Safely remove hardware" feature.
Click the icon in the Notification Area and stop the device before you
remove it.

2. Plug in a USB storage device, hardware is recognized a drive letter
is mapped according to Storage Management, but the letter is already
being used by a mapped network share, have to re-assign a different
drive letter and then it's good `till next try.

This is by design. That is why network drives should have drive
letters from Z downwards.

 

[Steve N.]

Make sure that you are using the "Safely remove hardware" feature.
Click the icon in the Notification Area and stop the device before you
remove it.

This has nothing to do with removing the hardware, it has to do with a
drive letter not being associated with the device at the time it is
connected. The "Safely remove" feature works fine.

This is by design. That is why network drives should have drive
letters from Z downwards.

A lousey design then, and goes the opposite direction from the Novell
convention (which we use, since we use Novell servers) and I'm sure you
meant "from Z upwards". We also assign drive letters to network shares
based on this convention and convenience. "H:" is easy for the user to
remember as their "Home directory", "S:" is easy for them to note the
"Share" folder on the server, etc.

The OS should not assign a device a drive letter that it obviously knows
(or should know) is already in use. This has been a problem since MS-DOS
and you'd think Microsoft would've fixed it by now. At least in the DOS
days the OS had the balls to actually REPLACE the drive contents with
the new drive mapping instead of pretending.

Steve