I use an external drive for my backups using Macrium Reflect, once a week.
At the recommendation of Seagate I don't leave it plugged in, when I do plug it in it chooses an arbitrary drive letter. Is there a way to force it to the same letter every time?
Build 19043.1237
I believe if you manually change the drive letter to something higher than you will ever hit automatically it will keep the assigned drive letter. For example P: for portable.
That's correct- simply change the drive letter in Disk Management.
Note that you can only have one unique drive so allocated- if you try doing that for a second, the first will no longer be allocated that drive letter.
There's also a way to have Macrium's backup job recognise the external disk by its hardware id, which I've never used.
Strange- I've used the drive letter method for years.
Did you change your external drive's letter like this? (Of course it won't be C: ...!)
Yes, I did this last week and tested it with a couple of thumb drives and it seemed to work as expected. I did it again now and will repeat the tests.
Just repeated it and it works as advertised, so I don't get why it didn't work this morning.
In a command prompt (with admin privileges) run:
Then try assigning the drive letter to the USB drive.Code:diskpart automount scrub exit exit
I know this is a longshot but you must [in Disk mgmt.] assign it to a different letter than the one it has automatically, temporarily set i.e.
- if Disk mgmt. has automatically assigned E: then you cannot choose E: as a permanent assignment.
- if Disk mgmt. has automatically assigned E: and E: is what you want as a permanent assignment then you'll have to manipulate things to set it up- disconnect it,
- plug in others so that E: is used up,
- reconnect the desired one,
- disconnect the one using up E: and
- only then tell Disk mgmt. to permanently assign E: to it
The relevant tutorial is
Change and Assign Drive Letter - TenForumsTutorials
and the relevant Registry Key is
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices
By the way, and this is another longshot, Windows can get itself confused about drive connections sometimes by remembering drives that have just been disconnected.I have never encountered this problem when assigning drive letters [only when using If Exist … in a script] but thought it worth mentioning.If Disk mgmt. does not behave as expected then it is worth rebooting so you can start again with a clean sheet.
All the best,
Denis
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