Disk Drive, change of allocation letter

[ainitatyb]

This morning I plugged in my external disk drive which is normally Drive F, but because I already had something plugged in, it reallocated itself to Drive G I really need this drive to be F and have tried unplugging everything and rebooting, but it still comes up as G. Does anyone know how I can reallocate this drive to G?

[ChuckFickens]

open disk management with the drive plugged in, right click on the drive and select change drive letter or paths.

[society]

My own changes all the time to E, F, G, H. I've never encountered a problem.

Chuck, is this a bad thing that happens?

[ChuckFickens]

It's not normally going to cause a problem unless you have anything that needs the drive to be a certain drive letter which is not the norm for an external drive.

BTW ainita, I can give much more precise directions if you say what version of windows you are running.

[society]

Thanks Chuck.

I do sometimes have more than one devices plugged in to different USB ports. I'm guessing the computer remembers the last drive used and use that name?

[heathfield]

Good old Microsoft - they've never managed, (or bothered), to sort this one out. Often infuriating, trying to find something when messing about with USB devices on the PC.

[ChuckFickens]

You can sort it out with windows, just mount the stick as a folder path rather than a drive letter.

Problem is people are so used to windows working with drive letters now that mounting anything as a path in the existing file system is an alien concept to them.

[boxtops]

Chuck (if I may, ainitatyb) - I put my memory stick into the USB slot here yesterday and the computer couldn't see it. Could that be because the stick is encrypted to our work systems? I tried it to find it on all the drives but just kept getting the message: no disk installed.

[AlBags]

One trick is to use a high up letter for anything hot-pluggable that you want to stay the same. ie .. I use 'P' for printer card slot, Z for Virtual Drive, and locked drives of H, J, K, L, M for other USB or U3 drives.
If you use USB a lot, use USBSafelyRemove. It has great tricks and enables add-on drives to be locked, renamed, and a lot of other stuff.

[ainitatyb]

Hi Chuck, and others, I'm using Windows 7