Set USB Drive Letter

[greg0303]

I was wondering if there is a way to set the drive letter automaticlly for any usb drive you connect. The problem with XP on a network is that the usb drive will take the first drive letter after the last phsyical drive, so normally E:. But there are network drives attached to E so the usb drive will not display because it too maps itself to E.
The current fix is to remap all CD Rom drives to Z so that a usb drive being attached will grab D as its letter, but the better solution is to be able to set any usb drive to automaticly connect to a particular drive letter. Is there a group policy that might be able to set this?

 

[MichaelF81]

I do not think there is a way to set it the way you are desrcibing, BUT, you can set a certain device to a specific drive letter.

1) Right click on 'My Computer' and select 'Manage'.
2) click on 'Disk Management'
3) locate the device in either thelist on top or on the bottom.
4) select that device, right click on it and select 'change device letter'

Enjoy.

 

[greg0303]

The problem with that is it will only set a particular USB key to that drive. If you always use that exact key it will always use the set drive letter, however once you plug another USB key in, even if its the same manufacture and model it will think its a new key and set it to E again. It looks like the Registry sets HKLM\System\MountedDevices to a serial number of the USB key so once you set it in Manage section it knows to set that particular drive to the letter. There must be a way that once XP sees a USB drive attach it forces it to a drive letter you assign.

 

[MichaelF81]

This would conflict if you had 2 keys in at once though

 

[greg0303]

Well we were hoping to solve that problem if it became a problem, but because it is very unlikely that a user would have two keys in at once then this would be the best solution.

 

[MichaelF81]

There is no way to assign a drive letter to some new usb device that has never been loaded before. At least not one I am able to find. The best bet is to assign the drive letter to the device and then go from there.

 

[greg0303]

I have a script that updates the registry to set the Drive letter but dose anyone know how I could force it to run whenever windows detects a usb key is connected?

 

[MichaelF81]

Try putting an autorun.ini file on the USB ket to auto-run that script. That is the best I can think of, and I asked some co-workers too.

 

[argentQ]

Another issue we have here is that our users do not have local admin, and so cannot run Disk Management to assign another drive letter - this is very annoying.
As a workaround, I:
1. open a dos prompt and do a RUNAS /U: administrator cmd.exe
2. From the opened CMD.EXE, i can then run DISKMGMT.MSC which then has admin rights to assign another drive letter

This is also useful for a whole raft of other admin tasks when you do not want to logoff the user..

 

[strongm]

You need to be aware that that only works because someone has (foolishly) failed to set a password for the local administrator ...

 

[zeuz]

I use a utility called USBDLM

http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbdlm_e.html

it actually allows you to set drive letters based on criteria as well. ie any key over 64MB can be assigned to F:. a drive with the volume name of 'MYDRIVE' can always be B: etc.