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Flash Drive (Drive Letter)?

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Tony414

MIS
Feb 3, 2003
197
US
Hello,
This has been happening to me for quit some time. I have to network drives E: and F: When I put a flash drive in, it doesn't show up because it uses drive E: even though it's already taken. Is there a way to correct this? Thanks in advance for the help.

Tony
 
You plug the flash drive in and the change the drive letter in Computer Management>Disk Management, but that will only apply to that specific flash drive. If you use a different drive, Windows will default to mapping the new drive to E (or whatever). I'm not sure where one would change what letter Windows starts with for new drives.
 
Yes. I know how to change it. I'm just trying to figure out why this happens? Why isn't it picking the next available drive letter G: ?
 
It is a good idea to make Mapped drives using Z as a drive letter then the sort of problem you are seeing might not occur.

Drive letter assignment

When a USB storage device is connected to a Windows® XP system, Windows® will install the device dynamically using generic USB mass storage device drivers. Once a drive volume is installed, the file system will attempt to mount the device and assign it a drive letter. If the device had previously been given a drive letter, it will be assigned the same drive letter again (if available). If the USB device has not been seen before, it will be assigned a new local drive letter which will be the first one above the last local drive letter starting from A: or C: (if available).


USBDLM V4.0.0 - USB Drive Letter Manager for Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003 and Vista

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It is good practice to assign mapped drives letters from Z downwards. Not only does this prevent drive letter assignment problems when connecting removable drives, it also ensures that the drives are read correctly. I had a problem a couple of years ago where a member of staff reported that their 256MB flash drive was showing as having 1.44MB - remapping network shares from E to Z etc solved the problem.
 
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