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Drive Letters Problem


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Hello everyone,

After searching for an hour in the forums for something similar to my problem I finally gave up and decided to see if you can give me an idea.

At my work place, we have multiple mapped network drives but every time I connect my usb hard disk drive the OS fails to assign a letter.

E.g. drive F: is a mapped to a server but the only letter that the OS would find the drive under is F. So I have to disconnect the drive and then I get access to my USB.

I know I can change the letter drive from the Disk Management but some GENIUS at IT has blocked our access to it.

Is there a way to bypass this lock and still be able to assign the USB to a letter drive X:?

Oh, one more thing... for some reason if I start up the pc with the USB device it recognizes it as a local hard disk instead of removable. Of course, F fails to connect to the server because it reads the local USB first and all of our apps are linked to that drive letter. So I have to reset everything every single time which REALLY annoys me.

If you have any ideas or input please let me know.

Thanks

Edited by besnia
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At my work place, we have multiple mapped network drives but every time I connect my usb hard disk drive the OS fails to assign a letter.

E.g. drive F: is a mapped to a server but the only letter that the OS would find the drive under is F. So I have to disconnect the drive and then I get access to my USB.

A known issue. Call Microsoft and complain :whistle:

I know I can change the letter drive from the Disk Management but some GENIUS at IT has blocked our access to it.

How about DISKPART?

Is there a way to bypass this lock and still be able to assign the USB to a letter drive X:?

Oh, one more thing... for some reason if I start up the pc with the USB device it recognizes it as a local hard disk instead of removable. Of course F fails to connect to the server because it reads the local USB first and all of our apps are linked to that drive letter. So I have to reset everything every single time which REALLY annoys me.

This is because your BIOS is loading the driver before Windows is. This may mean that you're using BIOS drivers to access the drive, and it may be only working as a USB 1.1 device (which I think is like only 12MB/s? Does it seem to run slower when you do it this way?)

Sorry, I don't really know how to fix your problem, but I have run into similiar issues. If you can't fix it with Disk Manager, then you probably don't have access to DISKPART either. You say that the USB drive wants the same drive letter as your first network drive, and that you can only see the USB drive if you disconnect the network drive? Then have you tried mapping that network drive to a different drive letter and see if the USB works then?

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Yes, if I map the network drive to a different letter it works fine but the problem is that most of our applications running here are set to default to F: so every single time I try to work on something I have to relink it and on 2 of the apps it doesn't even work. And you are right I can't use diskpart either.

Thanks for the input blindwig if anything else comes to mind please throw a line or two or as a last resort I will blank the admin pass with a script I have handy. I really wish there was another way.

Edited by besnia
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Not sure exactly what the problem is, but maybe if you have other drives set up then the USB would grab the next available drive letter after F:

To try, use the subst command, or simply map a,b,d,and e to network drives.

Subst /?

Associates a path with a drive letter.

SUBST [drive1: [drive2:]path]

SUBST drive1: /D

  drive1:        Specifies a virtual drive to which you want to assign a pat

  [drive2:]path  Specifies a physical drive and path you want to assign to

                a virtual drive.

  /D            Deletes a substituted (virtual) drive.

Type SUBST with no parameters to display a list of current virtual drives.

AutoIt3, the MACGYVER Pocket Knife for computers.

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This is a small edit to my previous post. At first I thought that the SUBST would work but it only creates "a drive link" and pretty much just copies the drive. Which in my case still remained a problem. The SUBST command though gave me an idea about MOUNTVOL command. So the way I solved my problem was in command prompt

>net use f: /d 

;diconnected my mapped network drive

Then I plugged my USB which stole the F: letter for its own use right away.

>mountvol f: /l 

\\?\Volume{XXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-000XXXXXXX}\

;got the volume of my USB drive

>mountvol f: /d

;disconnected the local USB drive

>mountvol x: \\?\Volume{XXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-000XXXXXXX}\

;changed the drive letter

After this, the system automatically recognizes the usb and assigns drive x: to it even when restarted.

This can easily be put in an AutoIT script but I leave that to those who like myself have to cheat the admin inconsidered setup.

Thanks all for your input because without them I would have had to deal with this for days on.

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