I want my computer to recognize an external hard drive on a specific letter all the time. How?

Question

I use my computer personally and for school. It has dual hard drives recognized as C: & D:, a back up partition recognized as E:, & a DVD drive recognized as F:. It's been configured by the IT department to connect to a network drive when on campus known as "The Student G: Drive", as well as a personal storage H: drive.

The problem is that I also have a 500 GB Lacie external hard drive that I occassionally connect as well as a 2 GB SanDisk flash memmory stick. Sometimes I plug these devices in and Windows XP automatically recognises them and assigns the appropriate I: or J: designation.

Sometimes when not on campus & as such, not connected to the "Student G: Drive" (Always present under network drives in the My Computer Tab), XP will recognise my Lacie/ SanDisk drive as the "Student G: Drive". Other times it will not allow me to connect to these devices at all even though the "Remove Hardware" icon shows up.

Can I set XP to always connect to the Lacie as I: drive? How?

Answer 1

Hi. From the web:
"When you add and remove hard drives, optical drives, or other storage devices from your PC, Windows may automatically adjust the drive letters assigned to those drives or the partitions on those drives. This can be a problem if you have software that expects to find files stored under a specific drive letter. Here's how to permanently assign a drive letter to a specific device or partition:

1. Go to Start and right-click My Computer, click Manage, and under Computer Management and Storage click Disk Management.
2.

In the right-hand pane, right-click the drive you want to change. You can select either the drive's bar representation at the bottom of the pane or its drive letter that's listed at the top. Right-click Change Drive Letter And Paths.
3.

Click Change, and then click Assign The Following Drive Letter. Choose the letter you want to assign from the pull-down menu on the right and click OK."

Hope this fixes your problem.

Answer 2

click start, control panel, performance and maintanence, administrative tools, computer management, click on disk management. right click the drive u wanna change, and choose the option to change drive letter assignment.

Answer 3

try deleting the partition and then creating a new simple volume using disk management in windows 7

Answer 4

you have to connect drives one by one , i mean , first conect the drive you want it to be a c: and turn on the computer ,then turn it off conect the drive and install the other one , untill you get the order that you want :)