I am having troubles with drive letters changing on me. I thought the Drive Management (DM) solution would work every time but not so!
DM's "change drive letters and paths" (CDL) sometimes doesn't let me change to the letter I want. I have many links that refer to drive E: (Elements). With E: pointing to another drive I get about 10 shortcut icons on my desktop. When I boot up and the letter is changed to say H: I try CDL and it doesn't give me E: as a choice. This happens about 30% of the time. I shut down, remove some drives and reboot. Sometimes I can get CDL to give me E: for my Elements drive and I am ok. Today I tried rebooting 3 times and the first two kept my Elements drive at E: But the 3rd time it was changed to some other letter.
I found a dos program (service program) called DISKPART which runs in XP to allow me to list, select, remove and assign letters. Sometimes the letter E: was assigned to a different drive and I have to remove E: so it's free, then assign Elements to E: and I change the removed drive to another free letter. Most of the time that works but XP may not keep it when I reboot.
I have tried to rearrange the position of my USB connected drive to see what that does to keep my Elements at E: over a reboot but it only frustrates me.
NOTE:
Is there a way to seek out all the shortcuts that use E: and change them to something like Q: and get the assignment of Elements to Q:? Maybe by picking the last letter, XP won't change it to something else.
My device assignment problem is with USB connected devices. I have 2 USB in the front of the Dell and 6 in the back. I connect one of the rear USB ports to a powered 10 port USB expander. This gives me 17 USB ports to connect my devices to. Currently I use 1 front port, 5 rear ports and 5 ports of the expander for my devices.
Does anyone know how XP scans the ports to assign letters?
Dell Dimension 460i, XPPro SP3, 3GB Ram, 11 external devices, Lots of disk space.
Thanks
