This is where Dante stepped in and wrote an explanation on how to assign a specific drive letter to the USB drive.  He also mentioned that the tool would not work in Windows Vista and that the method using Disk Management would.

Right-click on the My Computer icon in Windows XP or on Computer in Windows Vista and select Manage form the menu. You can alternatively access it by entering compmgmt.msc in the run box or search box. Now select Disk Management in that menu and perform a right-click on the drive that you want to assign a specific driver letter to.

Now select Change Driver Letter and Path and assign the specific drive letter to the device.

Related posts

• USB Flash Drive Write Protection (12)
• Speed up Hard Drives under Windows Vista (0)
• Permanently Assign Drive Letters to USB Devices (1)
• Howto fix slow hard drives (2)
• Assign Drive Letters to Folders (2)

A far superior solution is to use a software called USB Drive Letter Manager which is highly configurable automatically solving possible conflicts between USB devices and network drives. The reason for such a conflict is that Windows XP assigns the first available drive letter to a device that gets connected without checking first if there is a network share on that drive letter.

USB Drive Letter Manager runs as a service in Windows and loads the configuration every time a device is connected to Windows. You would therefor first download and unzip the software to a location on your hard drive and install the service using the _install.cmd file.

Once the service is running you can stop, start and uninstall it using the files located in the same directory. Edit the file USBDLM_sample.ini afterwards which is the configuration file for the USB Drive Letter Manager. Once you are done editing it you remove the _sample part of the filename and save it into the same directory.

There are lots of ways to configure this file and I would like to show only a few possible scenarios. The excellent help file, available in English and German, explains everything in details.

One possibility would be to assign a range of drive letters to USB devices and / or exclude drive letters who will never be assigned to those devices.

[DriveLetters]
Letter1=X
Letter2=Y
Letter3=Z

The option above would assign the letters X,Y and Z to USB devices that are connected to the computer.

[ExcludedLetters]
Letter1= E
Letter2= F
Letter3= G

This would exclude drive letters E,F and G from being assigned to USB Devices. You can naturally increase both by adding more lines like Letter4= and so on.

While this is already helpful it does not assign a drive letter permanently to a specific USB device. To do that you have to tweak the configuration further.

One possibility would be to assign a drive letter to an USB device of a specific size.

;USB drives above 20GB at U:
[DriveLetters10]
MinDiskSize=20GB
Letter1=U

This would assign the drive letter U to an USB device with at least 20 Gigabytes of storage. Please note that the first line is simply a comment and the second line has to use a unique number between 1 and 99 plus one without a number.

The software checks if each DriveLetters configuration is true or false and will use the first true one.

The best solution to assign a specific USB device to a drive letter would be to use the devices serial number in the configuration. To find out about the serial number you use the script ListUsbDrives_To_Notepad.cmd which is located in the root directory of the application as well.

The script will create a new text file listing all of your devices including your hard drives. Browse to the USB drive and look for the lines Ctrl DevID= or Friendly Name=. You can use both to assign a drive letter to that USB device. This would look like the following:

;USB device:
[DriveLetters10]
DeviceID1=1234567890ABCD
Letter1=V

I don’t want to detail more of the options but just name a few that could be useful. It is as well possible to assign drive letters by USB port, Volume Label, drive type, device type, bus type, partition number, existance of a file and letters by active user.

I have not encountered a problem working with USB Drive Letter Manager yet and was able to assign specific drive letters to all of my USB devices. I can help if you encounter problems or have difficulties writing the configuration, just drop me a line in that case then.

Read More:

USB Drive Letter Manager

Related posts

• How to assign a specific drive letter to the USB drive (3)
• USB Port Protection (7)
• USB Flash Drive Write Protection (12)
• Speed up Hard Drives under Windows Vista (0)
• Quickly Remove USB Devices (2)

Click Start, Run and enter cmd. This should open the command line interface of your windows operating system. The command that we need is the “subst” command and we use it the following way.

subst drive folder

Lets say you want to assign the drive letter X to the folder d:\movies on your hard drive. To do that you write the following command:

subst x: d:\movies

That is all. Fairly easy isn’t it ? Now the drive letter x: remains accessible as long as you do not turn off or reboot windows. If you want to make this permanent you will have to do the following.

Create a new file and name it drive.bat. Edit the file and add the line subst x: d:\movies to it and save it.

Right click the Start button, select Open All Users. Open Programs, Startup and right click that location. Select New Shortcut, and select the drive.bat file that you created. Select Next and finish. The command will be executed for all users with every startup of windows.

If you are running for example Windows 95 you could edit the autoexec.bat and add the line there.

Related posts

• How to assign a specific drive letter to the USB drive (3)
• XdN Tweaker for Windows (3)
• Windows XP Run Count List and Editor (3)
• Windows XP prompts to activate every time (6)
• Windows Xp Diagnostic Guide (0)