I have an external USB hard drive for my Windows XP laptop. Normally it comes up as drive E:, however if I have other external drives such as a USB flashdrive attached to the computer at startup, the hard drive may show up as F: or G:. The problem now is that a program such as iTunes can’t find any of my music because the drive letters have changed.
Is there a way I can force my external hard drive to always be recognised as E: regardless of what other temporary drives are connected at startup?
Once E: is allocated to a drive it is not possible to insert your external drive and have it take over E:, forcing the current E: to become F: or something, if that’s what you were hoping for.
The question is more, how can you force those other drives not to be E: leaving that letter free for it. That, I’m not sure is possible or not, but that’s what you are looking for. Hope that helps your search!
If no-one more useful than I pops up here you may be reduced to posting in a MS forum. Sorry about that.
You are correct, though my external drive is always connected so it’s more a matter of having it recognised first at startup. Normally this is not a problem. When I have my USB thumb-drive and my hard drive connected at startup, the hard drive is allocated E: and the thumb-drive F:. This morning, though, my wife had plugged her MP3 player in to a USB port so it could be charged and when I started the computer my external hard drive had been relegated to G:.
You can change the drive letters of the other drives very easily. If you right click “My Computer” go to “Manage”. There you will see Storage, which when expanded contains “disk Management”. There you can right click on the drive, and change drive letters and path. Change the USB flash drive to whatever, and the external drive to E.
Start Windows Explorer
Right click on “My Computer” branch at top of listing
> Manage > Storage > Disk Management
Right click on the listed drive you wish to assign > Change Drive Letter & Paths
Change drive letter to one far enough out that removable storage units will not effect it.
Thanks