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Michael_Mulvaney

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Change automatic drive letter assignment for external HDD

Every time I connect a USB external drive to my Dell notebook with XP professional the OS assigns drive letter 'F'. This is because C is OS, D is data partition and E is DVD drive. But this is a problem as I have F as a mapped network drive. So I have to change drive letters before I can access the external drive.I could change the mapped network drive but I would prefer to change the letter that is automatically assigned to the external disk. Is there any way to do this?
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Wayne Michael
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go to disk manager and you can change it there

right click my computer - manage computer - disk manager

oh yeah..  if you change drives you have to change the letter for a new drive too..  I can't remember but might also make a difference if it is a different usb port.

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uniqueinfotech

If the network drive is mapped when you plug in the USB drive windows will map the USB drive to another letter. To make network drive mappings stay you can use the /persistent:yes switch from the commandline, or check the "reconnect at logon" if you're using the GUI wizard
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ASKER

Thanks for the feedback so far. I would like to comment as follows:
1) Even if the network drive is mapped, with 'reconnect at logon' Windows XP ALWAYS wants to give the letter F to the external HDD on my Dell laptop. I moved the DVD drive to Z so that maybe Windows would now make the external HDD E, as the DVD drive used to be, but no, it does not happen.
2) The HDD is not visible from Windows explorer although it is listed as F in Disk manager. So, disk manager shows the HDD as F but windows explorer shows F as the network drive.
3) As soon as I disconnect the network drive F, the external HDD becomes visible in windows explorer as F
4) I can mess with the letters to make everything visible but what I wanted was a fix to amend this apparently automatic behaviour. I wondered if this was a problem with the way in which the IRQs are handled on my Dell laptop.
My experience with using the Disk Management Console as wrmichael suggested changes the letter for good. If you followed those instructions and changed the drive letter to G, does the USB drive show up as G? If you then unplugged and replugged in the USB drive does it show up as F or G?

Do you use a login script to map network drives upon log in?
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B12BLIB
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As others pointed out when the USB drive was first used, the mapping for the network drive was not present so the system assigned the USB the next available letter.  This drive letter is now tied to the USB device in the registry.  As others have pointed out, once you assign an alternate letter to the USB drive, the usb will be assigned the same drive letter whether it is plugged in.
The USBDLM was the exact answer to my exact problem. I downloaded the application and followed the instructions. After starting the service my USB HDD was immediately re-assigned the drive letter of my choice and I can keep the original letter for the network map. Thank you!