Drive Letter change @ reboot

stevech · #1 04-09-2006, 11:41 AM

Hmmm, my SageTV server rebooted and it was many days before I noticed that the external USB drive changed letters from G to E. So SageTV had been setup for drive G as the second video store. I noticed it when my wife complained that she was having to delete a lot more shows to keep from running out of disk.

I wonder if there's a way to preclude this. I suppose this can happen any time you have a different suite of USB storage peripherals at boot time. For example, having a USB thumb drive plugged in at boot time might cause the letters to shuffle.

Is there a way to lock-down a drive letter to a given USB drive's identity (volume name or some such) ?

(grfr this Windoze drive letter sheme - a left-over from the 1970's, is dumb, unlike Unix. I think XP Pro's ability to have volumes as links might fix this but I'm not that familiar with it, and how it would cope with the variations USB).

GKusnick · #2 04-09-2006, 02:02 PM

Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management. Right-click the drive and choose Change Drive Letter and Paths.

stevech · #3 04-10-2006, 01:16 PM

yes- but I didn't think that "locked" the USB drive to that letter for all future reboots where other USB drives may be connected

GKusnick · #4 04-11-2006, 01:05 AM

Well, if you use popular letters like E or F there might be a problem with new drives grabbing those letters first. But if you assign unique letters from the back half of the alphabet to all your existing drives, there's no reason why those assignments shouldn't stick across reboots. That's been my experience anyway.

When in doubt, try it and find out.

gplasky · #5 04-11-2006, 06:28 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by GKusnick

Well, if you use popular letters like E or F there might be a problem with new drives grabbing those letters first. But if you assign unique letters from the back half of the alphabet to all your existing drives, there's no reason why those assignments shouldn't stick across reboots. That's been my experience anyway.

When in doubt, try it and find out.

Good rule of thumb is start with Z:. I've noticed some card readers want to be the F: drive and if it can't it won't show up on the PC. Most of the USB drives I've used will just take the next letter.

Gerry

stevech · #6 04-11-2006, 04:01 PM

OK on high letters. What a hack.

I would have thought Windows could, by now do better. You'd think that they could key off of the volume name on the media, this being independent of the physical interface.

Windows has a mount point concept too, but as I understand, it still is drive letter dependent.

Maybe Linux has the same USB drive interface ID ambiguity?

Currently Active Users Viewing This Thread: 1 (0 members and 1 guests)