Flash drive letters

[dakels]

- Restricted machines (this one is not)
- Several network drives H-L for our group.
- Dell Optiplexs
- Win XP SP2 w/Active Directory
- Sandisk Cruzer flash drives + other external storage devices

I'm having a problem with drive letter assignments. Mostly Sandisk Cruzers.
Whenever they connect, more often then not they are trying to grab a letter which is assigned to a network drive. I can't ask the IT server guys to remap the drives of course, why they didn't go from Z-H instead of H-Z is beyond me. I am under the impression that XP does not recognize network drives when assigning physical drives.

Any suggestions to get around this? I have usb drive letter which works well and a little faster then going into disk management every time I insert a flash drive. Problem is these stupid Cruzers have 2 partitions and it mounts both making it a bit confusing (trying to consider other people). So when I plug in 2 USB drives and use usbdriveletter I end up with 4 new drives partitions showing but only 2 are the usable data drives. I really need a way to just tell windows to take any removable media and start assigning from Z down.

 

[taltamir]

reassign drive letters to your mapped drives yourself. Just map them from Z downwards. That way the USB will never conflict with it (since the USB will grab the lowest open letter)

 

[dakels]

You mean the network drives? I cannot re-assign, it is done through active directory. As for the USB drives, there are a lot of drives, like 10+ and always more here and there as they are passed around. That is not really controllable. I need something on windows that will be flexible with those arrangements. Its quite simple, drive goes in, auto-assign an unused drive letter like it is supposed to. The problem is that it does not recognize the network drives as used letters. Not sure how to get around this and I have no idea why Microsoft hasn't patched this issue. With flash drives passed around like candy nowadays I would have thought there is a better solution, even by 3rd party.

 

[sutahz]

I go into disk management and assign my 2GB flash drive A: and my 4GB flash drive B:, extrapolate what you need from that statement.

I didnt know you could go past Z... im such a noob.

Originally posted by: taltamir
reassign drive letters to your mapped drives yourself. Just map them from Z downwards.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting "downwards".
Do you need both partitons on the Cruzers? I'm assuming one of the partitions is that stupid U3 boot information. Go to u3.com or whatever and download a utility that uninstalls the U3 software. It wipes the flash drive so I'm sure you'll take the appropriate precautions.

 

[dakels]

Yes one of those partitions is the U3. Very annoying. I have done manual assignment of letters many times and for some reason it doesn't stick. Sometimes it does for a short time, then it changes and tries to go back to a network assigned letter (default). These are all the same type and model flash drives for the most part. I don't know what you mean by go past Z? I don't think you can. A-Z afaik.

 

[dakels]

hmm this looks promising. I will try it and report back.
http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbdlm_e.html