WynApse

A handy tip, but one that we shouldn't need to know about. The way in which local drives (such as USB sticks) install themselves on top of an existing logical or network drive is a blatant bug. Why have Microsoft never bothered to fix this bug?

Thanks. My external hard disk wasn't showing up on a new work computer as they were trying to use the same drive letter. This was what I needed.

Excellent tip! You just saved me a lot of trouble. I was about to return a USB card reader device because it was assigning drive letters over some of my network drives (I thought it wasn't reading it at all). Thanks again bro!

I have a backup program that backs up at night to removeable USB Drive. The scheduled backup goes to G: drive (USB Drive).
However, if I swap drives....disconnect and connect a diff. drive, the new drive becomes something else..H:.
This kills my scheduled backup which is looking for G:.
Tried the "change drive letter", set both to G: but MS still assigns the second drive as H:. Subst command won't work here, tried all day. Wonder if there is a way to permanently fix a drive letter for a USB drive.
Ramon

When i plug in my ipod or usb it doesnt show up in my computer. i have assigned a different letter path to my USB and ipod however, it doesn't show up in My Computer and whenever i remove it and plug it back it, it resets itself and i have to re-assign the letter drive. Can you help?

Thanks much - this was driving me crazy for the past few minutes. I just bought a 4gig flash drive and it just kept mapping itself to a drive letter used by one of me network mappings.

Wil G.

thanks, that's excellent. just what i needed - my parents were bugging me about a hard drive i put on, saying it kept interfering with their flashdrives & they didnt know which were which. i found this, thought it was excellent, and now think i can solve a couple of problems on my own pc.
by the way, the ipod thing - in itunes, you need to tick the box saying 'enable disk use' to see it as a drive. whether this helps the person i dont know, but it may help someone.
ciao, simeon

Thank you so much for the trick!
I have been frustated with my WDC My Book just because it detected on "Safely Removed Hardware" but no letter was assign to it.

Thank you very much :D

The option to change/assign a drive letter is not available for my external hard drive. The drive appears in the disk management window, but is inaccesible. Why would this be? I'm running Vista

Thanks! This was excellent.
I have an external USB hard-drive which i turn off with my computer every night and its usually the first thing i turn on in the morning. But this morning i put in a flash drive first and it "stole" the drive path G: so when i turned on the hard-drive that came under H:, therefore none of my music files and shortcuts would work. This solved all my problems and helped me learn something knew.
Thanks again.

Thanks for the instructions.....Helped me !!!

Awesome. Thank you soooo much....saved me a tone of time.

I have a problem with a Western Digital My Book external hardisk and I think someone here maybe can help.

The My Book uses USB2 and has worked fine on my computer until I changed some hardware, which caused some drive letter reconfigurations. Now the problem is I cannot get the My Book to be accepted by Windows. It asks for a driver and nothing I offer is accepted. After playing with some more hardware changes, yesterday the My Book was indeed recognized and I could see it in the explorer, with a new drive letter (I added a device which pushed things down).

I thought my problem solved. But today, the same occurs. The My Book cannot connect. The hardware configuration and drive letters are the same for the other hardware.

I believe that Windows is somehow looking for something using the wrong drive letter when the My Book connects to the USB port. But I cannot change the My Book drive, that is fix it to something, because it does not connect!

Can someone help? Maybe this subst command can be used to somehow force Windows to look in a correct location?

Thanks for any help!

Steve, Denmark

Thanks!

I *knew* this. I figured this out myself when I got bit maybe a year or so ago. And, of course, now that I need it again, it slipped my memory... I was even in the disk/storage manager, looking around and I didn't "re-figure" it out...

And I agree with David Arno... it Microsoft should address this. And in XP, too... Sigh...

Don

Thank you so much.. I have all my songs saved in an external drive, but itunes was having problem finding it because the drive letter was different from when I first imported it. iTunes is now able to find my songs and I dont need to re-import all the songs again =)

Is it possible to fix the drive letters used by USB memory in a 7 port USB hub? I'd like to allocate eg M to S for the 7 ports .

The application is multiple copying of files to many USB memory sticks.

Great Information. Saved me a ton of time and resolved an ongoing issue we had at several sites that were recently upgraded to new hardware. Since the USB Drive was showing as F:, and we had a mapped Drive that was designated F:, we could not figure out why it was not showing in My Computer.

Thanks so much, for some reason my usb changed to H:/ from its original G:/, Concidering that at my university drive H is asociated to my documents it could have caused havoc with my subversion repository.

Thanks for that your a life saver.
AJ

You really are a lifesaver. Your tip is greatly appreciated and saved me from going crazy. I wish for you to get back 100x what you have given all of us on here with this solution. Thanks so much.

Thanks so much, these are the directions I needed! They were simple and precise. It sure made it easy. Thanks alot!

I ditto Paula's message above. Thanks much!

Hi,

I have a external hard drive which was working normally. Once I had to change the drive letter and it has stopped working. It is seen on device manager but on disk management. I dont know how to make this drive appear on my computer. can u please help me

For those who would like an automatic method to assign the drive letter to the USB, here is the batch file that I use:

@echo off

REM ...

REM USBDRVNM.BAT by Paul J Crown

REM

REM Use SUBST to assign P: to the USB drive. Then use P: for all programs on

REM the USB drive.

REM ...

REM



REM I like to use P as the drive letter for programs on my USB drive (P for portable).

set pdrive=P

set udrive=X

if .%1. == .. goto readdrive

set udrive=%1

goto setdrive



REM ...

REM I wrote a quick COM file to return the drive letter as

REM an errorlevel. You can create this file using DEBUG.COM.

REM ...

REM Instructions to create DRVLTR.COM:

REM > DEBUG

REM -a 100

REM mov ah, 19

REM int 21

REM mov ah, 4c

REM int 21

REM [enter]

REM -n DRVLTR.COM

REM -rbx

REM 0000

REM -rcx

REM 0008

REM -w

REM -q

REM ...



:readdrive

drvltr.com

if ERRORLEVEL 3 SET udrive=D

if ERRORLEVEL 4 SET udrive=E

if ERRORLEVEL 5 SET udrive=F

if ERRORLEVEL 6 SET udrive=G

if ERRORLEVEL 7 SET udrive=H

if ERRORLEVEL 8 SET udrive=I

if ERRORLEVEL 9 SET udrive=J

if ERRORLEVEL 10 SET udrive=K

if ERRORLEVEL 11 SET udrive=L

if ERRORLEVEL 12 SET udrive=M

if ERRORLEVEL 13 SET udrive=N

if ERRORLEVEL 14 SET udrive=O

if %udrive% == X goto nodrive

goto setdrive



:setdrive

subst %pdrive%: /D >nul

subst %pdrive%: %udrive%:\

goto done



:nodrive

echo Try USBDRVNM D

echo where D is the drive letter you want assigned.



:done

set pdrive=

set udrive=

i have vista with 6 usb ports and i hooked up flash drive to download some photos - did not know which letter to use when prompt came up for drive - did not know letter for port where flash drive was plugged in

bless you - this is a problem that has been plaguing me for a year.

Thank you so much for this great solution to my problem. I too had a hard time with my iTunes trying to locate my music. And it was such a hassle having to import thousands of music files everytime. I even bought another WD Portable drive hoping it will come out as my F drive. Woo hoo... now I know the workaround.
You are such a blessing.
Thanks again.
Peace and God bless!!!

ps: The faster way I got there was right-click My Computer from my desktop shortcut.

I use "USBDLM" for assigning drive letters to specific external drives / devices.

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

A little bit tricky to setup the first time but easy from the second time.

All instructions are in the help file or on the site.

For me this a major life saver you are a F'N hero Dude! I have Gigs upon Gigs of Video Information to encode and transcode etc.... So when I restart or turn off one of my 7 external drives (2.8 TB Total) XP would randomly move them around destroying anywhere from 4-8 hours of linked rendering. This is very cool. Thank you very much. I'm goin have to see what that flashing box on the top right side is all about....thanks

Thank you. My computer decided to reassign my USB port a different letter (I guess it didn't like it's name), so iTunes decided it couldn't find my music. I called customer support for my laptop who told me I was not covered under warranty and did not know how to reassign the port, but he did know how to tell me to go back and restore my system to a time when the port had the right letter. "Very interesting". Again, thank you for your article

Yep Win XP has is always not assigning drive letters to USB devices even when it is installed, this thread should help you get the thing working http://www.nettechguide.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1979435

Brilliant my friend. Thanks for posting!!!

thanks for this clear solution to the problem

suppose i fix drive letter v:\ for usb drive. but suppose i map the another pc and gave the same drive letter it will change. i dont want it . i want to fix drive letter for usb drive. which can not be change. pls help me.

Can this be done : What I want to do is to be able to give someone a USB Flash drive, and ensure that it will always be assigned the same letter, no matter what PC it is placed in. Is that possible ?

Thanks ... most helpful.

my problem is near your solution.actualy my device fm37 ipod is being displayed in device manager but its drive is not present in disk management utility.
all mess hapened when i disconected ipod when the data was transferring.
i want to know how its drive could be find then i will try to change the drive letter.
plz help. your post is the best of all i searched for solution..

thanks for the help! i really needed this for my external harddrive

Ok, so I'm running Vista, and I just updated yesterday, and all of a sudden my USB HD is no longer recognized as drive Z:\. It's been fine up until now, even when I turn it off and back on it has stayed. Now it just grabs the next drive letter alphabetically that is not in use (it's been G, H and K). I've tried several times to reassign the drive letter to no avail, as every time I do, it suddenly doesn't show up in My Computer, and when I try to open it, I get an error message that says Location Is Not Available. So from there I can either change it back to the letter it picked up when I plugged it in before I changed it, or reset it and let it pick a new one. Is it something wrong with Vista, or am I forgetting to do something?

I'm running Vista, and I just updated yesterday, and all of a sudden my USB HD is no longer recognized as drive Z:\. It's been fine up until now, even when I turn it off and back on it has stayed. Now it just grabs the next drive letter alphabetically that is not in use (it's been G, H and K). I've tried several times to reassign the drive letter to no avail, as every time I do, it suddenly doesn't show up in My Computer, and when I try to open it, I get an error message that says Location Is Not Available. So from there I can either change it back to the letter it picked up when I plugged it in before I changed it, or reset it and let it pick a new one. Is it something wrong with Vista, or am I forgetting to do something?

Solution worked for me. The problem caused is when i used multiple USB drives simultaneously.

Your tip is greatly appreciated and saved me from going crazy. I wish for you to get back 100x what you have given all of us on here with this solution.

Bless you! I was wondering how this was done.

I am a high school student and always use many random different computers in one day. Also, the settings and files are reset each day so if I want any shortcuts to work, I have to change the setting each time. Is there any way to either automatically set the drive letter or configure the shortcuts to point to the specific drive letter? this would really help

It worked perfectly, thank you!

Philip

My USB Drive doesn't have a letter at all, and when i go to right click on it, it only shows me help. The other options are there but i cannot click on them. Any suggestions????

I work at a public library. We have 16 public computers. I am having trouble off and on with patrons who use their thumb drives. What happens is that the thumb drive gets assigned a drive letter, it can be accessed through command line, however, not through "My Computer".

I'm using XP SP3. What I need is a way either through a GPO or local setting to force the flash drive to use certain drive letters or NOT use certain letters.

thanks very much! this has solved the problem of my backup program backing-up to the wrong USB drive/s!

Great...Than you so much very helpful indeed....

Thanks so much, solved my problem

The solution proposed is great, but does not always work on my XP. It just sometimes goes crazy and assing a different letter to my drive. What does work always (at least for me, at least so far) is to mount the drive whatever letter it gets to a folder in the internal HD. Then just point your backups, media libraries etc to that folder.

In My PC / Management / Disk Management right click on the external drive and choose " change access letters ...". Select "Add" and then "mount to a folder". Pick up a folder and that´s it. The contents of the drive will be accesible by going to that folder. Changing your scripts, reimporting a media library can be a pain in the neck, but it will save you a lot of time afterwards.

Have fun.

Thank you! This has been a problem for sooo long.

Yey!! Thank you so much!!!

My "invisible" USB sticks have been doing my head in!!