USB stick drive letter

[Aijaz Akhtar]

My pen drive is always denoted by D Drive on my laptop (with other Win partitions as E and F. But in my office room desktop, it is at times accessible as Drive I at others it is J. Win partitions are of course C,D,E and F, G and H are CD and CDRW (XP Home is in D, the pirated XP Professional over Win98 was in C that I have now deleted and modified the Boot.ini file accordingly. Thus in Word or OOO menu, the MRU from the pen drive does not work, as it shows as I while the Pen drive in explorer shows it at J, or the other way round. Why is it so, and how does Windows assign the drive letter for the removable disk. Also, is it necessary to click the tray icon of USB drive and select safely remove the USB, and why?

[rajas]

First of all, It took some time to understand ur post. I thnk ur brain works faster than u hand(to type)

Drive letter assignments start from FDD with A: or B: and then the HDD starting from C: and then the our CD/DVD drivers. then comes the Removable devices like Flash Drives, Cameras(External storage devices).
A point to remember is that in case a ZIP Drive is hooked up, drive letter assignments will be in this order FDD, ZIP, HDD, and then CD/DVD.(atleast in XP.)

As we all know, usually the next available letter is assigned for the removable storage devices. So in ur case, Desktop computer shows properly the drive letter.

"To have proper drive letter assignments have all the external peripherals disconnected and install Windows. Gives very good results."

Regarding the Safe Removal of Plug and Play Devices this is wat MS has to say:

When hardware is removed from a running system without using the Safely Remove Hardware application, it is often referred to as surprise removal, because the operating system is not notified in advance of the removal. Surprise removal is particularly a concern for storage devices for which write caching is enabled, because when such devices are surprise removed, data loss or corruption might occur. To reduce the likelihood of data loss or corruption due to surprise removal of consumer oriented storage devices, Windows XP Professional disables write caching by default for these devices (such as cameras that include IEEE 1394 or USB storage, small form factor storage devices such as compact flash, and so on).

Although, many a times nothing is lost/corrupted, it better to remove the devices with safely remove harware icon

[Aijaz Akhtar]

Sorry for not being clear. My main problem was XP assigning Drive letter I at one time and J at another, that creates problems in the documents' short cuts in MRUs under File menu. And now it occurred to me that Is it because of my not 'safely removing the USB device' that WinXP still retains I for that drive, and when I re-insert the USB stick, it assigns next letter J? I will check it now if that is so.

[rajas]

Originally Posted by Aijaz Akhtar

not 'safely removing the USB device' that WinXP still retains I for that drive, and when I re-insert the USB stick, it assigns next letter J? I will check it now if that is so.

I dont want to agree with u as i tend to unplug my flash drive many times without the safe removal..and I get the same drive letter.
ne..ways try want u want to and do post it here.

[geekysage]

I think the problem is with the mounting of network drives on your computer. When that particular mounted network drive is up and running i.e. the computer with that disk is on and connected to your LAN, it gets the J slot and thus your USB drive gets the next drive letter I.

I am not very sure of this but check it out. Let me know if i am right.

Peace.

[Aijaz Akhtar]

Just now I removed and reinserted my flash drivwe, and sure enough, tghe letter changed from I to J now. So perhaops this is the case. And no, there is a problem of this system being connected to LAN. And at the moment it is NOT CONNECTED.