Windows Drive Letter conflict causes dropped drives and system crash....going NUTS!

[Qianglong]

Hope some of you guys can help me out here because it is driving me totally bananas:
I have a workstation with several drives and partition:

C to K ---> My physical drives and logical partition
Z to V ---> My network mapped drives.

Sometimes if my friend come over and plug in their USB drive, external drives or ESATA drives that has a conflicting drive letter with the physical drive the system will dismount my internal drives 😕 Drive D seems to always suffer from this problem and unfortunately all of my applications are installed on that drive.

The only way to have the dropped drives come up again is the reboot the system. Sometimes the system even unmounts the C drive - causing total system crashes 🙁

 

[Jeff7181]

Ok, I'm tempted to criticize you for having 9 partitions... but, I won't. 😉

The solution to your problem is mount points. You keep c: because you run windows... make every other partition a mount point. Create a directory called something like c:drives and then create subfolders for your partitions so you can maintain your sanity... c:drives\d_drive, c:drives\e_drive, etc.

I removed the \'s from the paths because it thought I was making smiley faces at you...

... the wink was intentional, though.

 

[corkyg]

The other thing is a hardware work around. You put a flash drive in your system after all your externals are alive. It will be assigned a drive letter different frrom all existing drives. Then you keep it in there simply to reserve the drive letter. When your "friend" comes over, he can replace your flash drive with his and it will take the same drive letter.