Working with several portable USB devices on one computer can be quite complicated when you consider that Windows is assigning the next free drive letter to a device that gets connected. This can lead to some confusion and a great tip that I would like to pass on is to assign USB drives to folders instead.
What I did was to create a main folder on my E: drive which I named USB. I then assigned all my USB devices to subfolders of that folder which led to less confusion on my part. (Create the subfolders before continuing). Here is what I did after creating the folder structure.
Press Windows R, enter diskmgmt.msc and hit enter. This opens the Disk Management configuration that should display all drives and devices currently connected to your computer. Pick an USB device from the list and right-click that entry. Select Change Drive Letter and Paths from the menu.
This should open a new window that is displaying the current drive letter of the device and three buttons at the bottom which are named Add, Change and Remove.
Click on the Add button, select Mount into the following empty NTFS folder and click on browse. Now navigate to the subfolder that you want to assign the usb drive to and confirm the assignment. The USB drive will from now on be accessible from that folder as well if it is connected to the computer.
You can remove the drive letter if you want that by marking it in the main window and clicking on Remove.
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Or you could use USBDLM.
Windows is indeed assigning next free letter to drive by default, but if you use disk management to manually assign it to some letter – it will remeber that choice for that drive.
So if you map flash drive to some distant from start (unlikely to be occupied) letter – it will always mount on that letter when plugged in.
It doesn’t need to be an USB drive, this works with any kind of drive. It’s useful, for instance, to have your “My Documents” folder in another drive or partition.
does this remember the folder assigned to a particular drive is (say) the drive is powered down and then turned on again later?
it would be cool to be able to use something like this to help save power by turning off devices unless you need them but have some certainty where it’s going to re-attach.
Maybe it needs an autorun pgm on the drive itself to do the mapping…
I wonder if you could use this to keep a persistent “My Documents” or even a whole profile on say a work and home PC via Thumbdrive.
I’ve got a good one for everybody:
This works great for USB devices (or whatever other physical media you’d like), but diskmgmt.msc does NOT recognize the virtual disks TrueCrypt generates. * Can anyone think of a way to mount TrueCrypt virtual drives to a FOLDER, for the same kind of reasons as someone would do the above tip? *
I’ve dug through various searches and found nothing so far. Please, help!!!
i just did just that: once you have your usb drive assigned to a folder, go to select file in truecrypt and select that folder to mount truecrypt virtual disk. then just make sure that the never save history option is unchecked in truecrypt, and your truecrypt virtual disk will be saved in drop down menu, so you don’t ever have to change the drive letter any more.
Excellent post. Thanks for this which I will share on my blog.
However, this does not work with different SD cards. For example, this method will not distinguish between SD card X or SD card Y when using the same USB-connected SD card adapter.
I used this to mount several external hard drives I use to store recorded TV, the only problem is that the search function, does not search within the attached drives, as it would do with regular folders, anybody know how to make it do that?
I have followed the instructions, however why do my drives letters E,F,G,H still show up in “Computer” and “Disk Management”