Making hard drive letters sticky in Windows

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Ambush Commander
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Making hard drive letters sticky in Windows

Post by Ambush Commander »

I have a very peculiar external hard drive: when I leave it on for extended periods of time, it gets very hot. This temperature change doesn't appear to interfere with its functioning, but it tends to heat up the room quite a bit (nice in the Winter, not so nice in the Summer). This is inconsequential.

I have an external hard drive that I keep off most of the time. Usually, I turn it on only when I need to access gargantuan files that I keep on it. Now, as you may know, Windows assigns hard drives letters when they become available.

Consequently, the letter for my external hard drive tends to oscillate between I: and H:. Subsequently breaking any shortcuts on my system.

Is there any way to make hard-drive letters sticky? (Some sort of UID the hard-drive has that you can reserve the letter for LAN-style?)
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feyd
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Post by feyd »

The only times I've had an external drive potentially fluctuate letters was when it would get attached to another physical port. Have you tried mapping it as a directory, instead of a drive?
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Ambush Commander
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Post by Ambush Commander »

It doesn't happen often. But enough to greatly irritate me.

Didn't know you could do that (map drives to directories). How would Windows identify the drive, though?
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Kieran Huggins
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Post by Kieran Huggins »

Try assigning it a letter in Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management > (right click on a partition and "Change Drive letters and paths")

I have a feeling it remembers based on the partition serial number, so USB port shouldn't matter. Just make sure the letter will be available. My storage drives are Z and X.
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Ambush Commander
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Post by Ambush Commander »

Ah, that's quite handy! That should do for now.
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AKA Panama Jack
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Post by AKA Panama Jack »

BTW, if you are running a dual boot system with XP and VISTA you should know that VISTA stores drive letter designations in the registry. XP uses the standard of storing the drive letters in the partitions. If you move the drive to another XP computer it will use the same drive letter if that letter is free. Under Vista the drive letter will always be different based upon what the lowest free drive letter happens to be at the time. So if you assign a drive letter under XP it will usually be something totally different in Vista.

Damned annoying.

Vista stores the drive letter designations under

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\MountedDevices

You can change drive letter designations the same way Kieran Huggins mentioned above in Vista as well except for partitions designated as boot, system or pagefile. Then you have to edit the registry entry I mentioned above.

You have no idea how much a pain in the butt this was when I setup a dual boot and resized the Vista Partition. I had to use regedit after the failed Vista reboot after resizing the parition to set the drive letter back to C. :P

Have I mentioned how much I think Vista blows chunks?
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