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2 removable drives - no drive letter assigned when connected

I have 2 maxtor USB drives that im trying to connect to a Win2k3 server. Only 1 drive will be connected at any time (swapped out for backups - 1 off-site one connected). The next drive letter available to windows (with no removable drives connected) is the G drive. I have my backup software backing up to the g drive, so when i plug in either external drive i want them to be assigned G: .
This however does not work. One retains G: - i unplug then plug in the second drive and it does not show up. I got into disk management and the drive is there but it is not assigned a drive letter. So i assign it G:. Then i unplug and plug it back in and once again it has no drive letter. Any ideas what is going on?

al-hasan

stephen15c: newer versions of Windows 'remember' the drives attached to the system. A unique ID is generated for each drive and saved in the Windows registry as well in the master boot record of the drive. With DOS based Windows you could always attach any drive and it would get the next available drive letter, but this is no longer possible.
Hope this helps you understanding what is happening, sorry that I do not have a solution for you.

Regards,
has.

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Lee W, MVP

What backup software are you using?

I have a script using NTBackup for my systems that looks for a marker file and when found, sets the backup drive to that drive letter. Works quite well for me.

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