Forcing a Drive Letter Designation for External Hard Disk

I am using Windows XP Pro. I have a 1TB external hard drive that holds all of my iTunes music and is also a scratch disk for my Photoshop CS3.
This drive has always been E:
So my iTunes is looking for that drive when it tries to access any of the 20,000 songs on there. But it can’t find any, because now the drive is showing up as F.

The drive was unplugged for about 10 minutes, and I plugged in a new iPod which became E:

Now, no matter how many times I repoot, unplug the drive or the iPod, or both… no matter what order I replug them in after repooting, no matter what I seem to do, the drive is now F, and the iPod is E.
Is there anything I can do to fix this??

It will take hours to re-index my Music folder with iTunes. And then, even if I do that, there is potential for this to happen again in the future. What if I plug something else in and my drive permanently becomes G.

I dont want to have to keep changing everything that is looking for stuff on my E drive. I want to force this thing to be the E drive.

Is there a way to do this??

repoot=reboot…

That’s an odd thing to mistype more than once.

First, connect both the drive and iPod to your computer. Then, go to Start -> Run, type “diskmgmt.msc” (without the quotes), and press Enter.

In the resulting window, right-click either the drive or the iPod and select “Change Drive Letter and Paths…”. In the next window, click “Change”. You will then see drop-down box where you can select the drive letter of your choice. Assign one, and press “OK”.

Do the same for the other device, and you’re home.

Done! Thanks!

Oh, good. I was going to propose a more draconian solution (remove the devices in Control Panel, then plug in the hard drive and let the system re-discover it). This works much better.