Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!
Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!
-
Congratulations derfloh on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!
Flash Drive (Drive Letter)?
- Thread starter Tony414
- Start date
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.
- Thread starter
- #3
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
Laptop can't see flash drive
thread779-1299330
cannot see removable drive due to registry hack
thread779-1324898
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
Laptop can't see flash drive
thread779-1299330
cannot see removable drive due to registry hack
thread779-1324898
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.
- Thread starter
- #6
- Status
