Drive Letter Roulette

by Bob Seidel

As I zip around town in my truck to help clients with their ailing PCs, I sometimes come across situations that I feel it would be appropriate to discuss here in my column because they are of concern to the larger segment of my general readership. Unfortunately, some of these situations can be a bit technically challenging, and the main discussion of this column is such. As always, if you have questions or concerns, seek professional help.

I actually do have fun doing my job, but one of my recent visits was a bit more painful. The person in question had a hard drive (HD) crash. Why? It's difficult to say, but these things do happen. When I got there and started testing, the HD motor would come on, but it would not enumerate (i.e. identify itself to the PC). The unfortunate aspect of this problem was that my client had many family digital photos on the HD, and no backup. I installed a new HD and had them up and running, but all I could recommend for the data on the old HD was to send it off to one of the companies that specialize in recovering data from broken HDs - in this case OnTrack Data Recovery (www.ontrack.com).

OnTrack is one of the oldest names in that business but the cost of recovery can be very expensive. If I get some feedback from my client on the cost and effectiveness of the data recovery, I will post it here. I installed an external USB HD to provide backups in the future.

Another interesting incident was a call that I received from one of my clients that has a local area network (LAN) installed in their office. They use software for their business that shares a database on the LAN. The problem was that they had installed a new printer (usually something a client can do themselves), but when done their network no longer functioned.

What caused the problem was that the printer had built-in slots for digital photo memory cards. Most devices like this (a digital camera, an external USB hard drive, an external digital memory reader, or a printer) use the standard USB Storage Class to connect to the PC. When a device uses the Storage Class, it gets assigned a drive letter. Your main hard drive is usually C: and devices are usually assigned ascending letters as they appear to the PC on startup or when they are plugged in. This assignment is dynamic, depending on when the PC first "sees" the device, and thus the assigned letters can vary.

And that was the problem. The software that my client was using uses what is called a Mapped Network Drive (MND) to share data on the LAN. MND also uses drive letters, but in this case the software wanted a particular letter only (G:). It turns out that the assignment of MND drive letters occurs AFTER the assignment of Storage Class drive letters. Thus, the new printer memory slots were assigned their letters first, and got G:, leaving that unavailable for the network. And, thus, the network software failed.

MS Windows does provide a way to manually assign drive letter numbers to devices, but it is not in an area of Windows that people normally use. Here is how (Windows XP only):

Click Start / Control Panel to start the Control Panel. Click on Performance and Maintenance and then Administrative Tools. (If you are using the Control Panel Classic View, click on Administrative Tools directly.)

Within Administrative Tools you will see Computer Management. Open this up, and then click Disk Management in the left pane. This will bring up the Disk Management utility. In the list of drives at the upper right, RIGHT click on the drive in question and select Change Drive Letter And Paths. This will allow you to change the drive letter assigned, and this should be permanent until you change it again, even if the device is unplugged and re-plugged.

Again, sorry to get off in the technical weeds, but this is a situation you may come across if you need to make sure that a device always has a fixed and particular drive letter. One hint: changing the C: drive letter is definitely NOT recommended!

(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport - Oak Island area. You can visit his Website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.)