Local Drive Letters Jumbled

  • Thread starter Thread starter Frenchy
  • Start date Start date
F

Frenchy

Well, one day I will learn to leave things alone <smile>

Decided to do a firmware upgrade on my two Optical drives. Both ASUS
DRW-2014L1 (drives E and F). Running Vista 64 Bit Ultimate

Running the Firmware exe file it upgraded drive E and did not seem to
touch drive F. Not sure if there is a command line parameter to do a
specific drive? The ASUS Support site was less than helpful.

So decided to Disable Drive E and then run the Upgrade on the only drive
left. That then changed all my storage drive letters around especially
my Data drive D (500 Gb Internal). Upgrade didn't work and the computer
was a mess as quite a lot of programs not registered and (My) Documents
on the D drive not working. Re-enabled the optical drive and rebooted
and then did a system restore back to earlier yesterday and that fixed
the drive letters and registered programs on the D drive.

Now I have one Optical drive with v1.01 firmware and one with 1.0. Have
had a couple of BSOD's, so I am generally pissed at myself!

If anyone has any pointers, so this doesn't happen again, much
appreciated and how to get the other drives firmware upgraded (reason I
did this was a problem writing again to an R/W disk and thought the
firmware upgrade may help)

Frenchy
 
Hi,
Whenever you make changes like hardware or change partitions windows will
rescan and re-assign drive letters, its a real pain in the arse at times.
However you can change the drive letters for your devices above the `C` boot
drive manually.
Just go into admin tools / computer management /disk management.
Right click the device and click change drive letters.
Its always a good idea to assign the CD drives to a higher letter when you
first install the o/s, (ie. WX ) that way any further partition created or
extra drives added will be assigned to a letter below the cd`s.
This will prevent problems after software was installed from the Cd drive
and the pc is looking to find that drive letter which could of changed.
Updating firmware should be done with caution as you could screw up a drive,
it probably would have been better to unplug one of the drives first as they
are of the same type.
Regards,
Graham.....
 
GrahamH said:
Hi,
Whenever you make changes like hardware or change partitions windows
will rescan and re-assign drive letters, its a real pain in the arse at
times.
However you can change the drive letters for your devices above the `C`
boot drive manually.
Just go into admin tools / computer management /disk management.
Right click the device and click change drive letters.
Its always a good idea to assign the CD drives to a higher letter when
you first install the o/s, (ie. WX ) that way any further partition
created or extra drives added will be assigned to a letter below the cd`s.
This will prevent problems after software was installed from the Cd
drive and the pc is looking to find that drive letter which could of
changed.
Updating firmware should be done with caution as you could screw up a
drive, it probably would have been better to unplug one of the drives
first as they are of the same type.
Regards,
Graham.....
Click to expand...

Thanks the reply. Yes, I will lock my Optical drive letters, so this
never repeats.
I did the Firmware upgrade because there was a small problem in burning,
seems that problem may have been caused by the Lightscribe driver in
Task Manager. I have changed that to not load at start-up. I am
waiting on ASUS support to tell me how to use the Firmware upgrade via a
command line with the F drive as a parameter. I think they may be all
watching the Olympics <smile> as slow to answer!

Regards
Frenchy
 
Frenchy said:
Thanks the reply. Yes, I will lock my Optical drive letters, so this
never repeats.
I did the Firmware upgrade because there was a small problem in burning,
seems that problem may have been caused by the Lightscribe driver in
Task Manager. I have changed that to not load at start-up. I am
waiting on ASUS support to tell me how to use the Firmware upgrade via a
command line with the F drive as a parameter. I think they may be all
watching the Olympics <smile> as slow to answer!

Regards
Frenchy
Click to expand...
Unfortunately Disk Management doesn't allow you to lock the drive
letters (just move them), guess I will have to troll the Internet for a
freebie to do this

Frenchy
 
larrydonline said:
This is related to my question. I'd like to be able to lock my current
drive letters because when I add a new USB hard drive Windows Vista Home
Edition has been giving it a letter that was already in use and renaming
all those that were below that letter. Last time I had to manually
change four different drive letters. Why it doesn't just assign the next
unused drive letter is beyond me. So I wonder if there is some kind of
third party software that can solve this problem?
Click to expand...
http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/downloads/1st_Disk_Drive_Protector_37494_p/

This may work, but I ain't tried it. Seems to be free and while it does
a bunch of things, it does allow drive letter locking.

Report back if you try it and it works

Frenchy
 
larrydonline said:
Thanks for the link, Frenchy. So far it appears to work as advertised.
It did lock the drives, even locks access to opening them by the
operating system. When I plugged in a new USB drive it took an unused
drive letter this time.

When you lock or unlock drives, you have to restart before it takes
effect, so the changes must be applied at registry level. This could be
a handy tool for someone who wants to keep his personal files all on one
drive so no one else can access it. It allows for password protection
too.
Click to expand...
Did it let you download a free evaluation?

After I posted the above link, I followed it through to the download
page and it looked like it wanted to charge you?

Frenchy
 
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