Drive Letter Mounting

[jackieofalltrades]

I'm hoping some of the collective knowledge on pprune can help me with a minor problem.

I am running Windows 7 and listen to all my music through Windows Media Player. I have a very large music collection, and so have stored all my files on an external hard drive with I have permanently connected via USB.

When I first start storing my files this way, the external drive had the label E:. And it is this location that WMP looks for in its library. However, recently I have found that every time I reboot my computer it now assigns the external drive as F:.

Although it is straightforward and simple enough to reset the drive to E: I am finding it frustrating to have to do this every time. I have tried changing the USB slot to each of those on the computer, but it still reverts the drive after rebooting to F:. Can anybody please advise on a way to permanently fix the external drive as E:, or conversely, easily alter the pathway for all the files in the WMP library to now look in F:?

Any help would be appreciated.

[Sprogget]

Probably the least painful fix would be to go to the music library in windows explorer & add F: as a location.

[jackieofalltrades]

Thanks, that has appeared to fix it. I hadn't realised that was another option in WMP.

[Milo Minderbinder]

one workround would have been to make it a shared drive, find it through exploring the network, then mount it as a permanent network drive and assign it the required drive letter
tortuous and illogical, but sometimes necessary,

[Mac the Knife]

Honestly, these kids...;)

Go to Control Panel\Administrative Tools\Computer Management\Storage\Disk Management\<your disk>\Change Drive Letter and Paths and change the drive letter assignation.

This will be then be sticky and survive reboots and other drive plugins.

Mac :ok:

Edited to add:

DriveLetterView - DriveLetterView - View/Change/Remove drive letters assignment in your system (http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/drive_letter_view.html)
and
USBDLM - USB Drive Letter Manager - USBDLM (http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbdlm_e.html)
are both free and make it easier.

Another approach would be to use Symlinks, Hardlinks, Junction points or Volume Mountpoints.
You do however need to do a bit of homework on how the NTFS filesystem works....

Junction Link Magic - Junction Link Magic (http://www.rekenwonder.com/linkmagic.htm)
and
Link Shell Extension - Link Shell Extension (http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/hardlinkshellext.html)
both free, provide an easy way to handle these.

:ok:

[bnt]

If you've set a particular drive letter, and then it changes, the most likely explanation is that some other device wants the same drive letter. I get card readers taking drive letters when they don't need them, for example. My way of handling this is to move every "known" device away from the lower letters e.g. I have drives J:, K: and L:. That way, any new devices don't affect the existing devices.

[jackieofalltrades]

Go to Control Panel\Administrative Tools\Computer Management\Storage\Disk Management\<your disk>\Change Drive Letter and Paths and change the drive letter assignation.

This will be then be sticky and survive reboots and other drive plugins.

This is what I was doing. However, despite this, every time I rebooted the external drive would now revert to F:

[Groundbased]

In similar vein, I have exactly the same set up. When I first set it up I changed WMP to rip music directly to the external HDD and this worked fine.

Suddenly it stopped doing it and ripped music to the My music folder instead. No problem thought I, I will go to the tools options in WMP and change it back again. However it won't allow me to change the rip folder. I've run as an administrator, re-installed and everything but I can't make it work.

Sure I can cut and paste the folders from My Music to the external HDD but its a bit of a pain.

Any ideas?

Ta