A couple of days ago, the drive letter assigned to my external USB 100Gb drive decided to change from E: to F:. Once upon a time that would have been no trouble, since I only used it for backup and external file storage, but for the last six months or so, I've had City of Heroes installed on it (to alleviate the space struggle with a tiny 60Gb drive on the notebook proper), and the change meant that the program wouldn't run.
(Side note: I remember, Cro-Magnon that I am, when drive letters were all relative and the registry was unknown and you could just move an application by, well, copying it to a new location. Now it's all like a Chinese puzzle box, and something as trivial as changing the drive letter renders an application unusable. Feh.)
I tried unplugging and repluggling and trying USB thumb drives to grab the letter and using the USB eject tool and rebooting and cycling the power and all that good stuff, but nothing helped.
Finally I did what all folks do at this point. I checked Google. And found this Authentic Real Certified Microsoft Article on the problem (for XP, which is what I have):
How to change drive letter assignments in Windows XP
And, so far, yes, that's done it.
So, for future reference ...
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This is a HUGE problem at the college. Faculty may carry a keychain full of USB drives, and have an external drive to boot, and of course we script them into several network drives. When they plug in a USB drive, Windows often assigns it a drive letter the same as one that is mapped to a network share - so it just doesn't show up. We go up to their offices (for our offices are of course in the basement, the only ones without a window along with publishing support) and all is well for a while. But Windows hiccups and all assignments wander away or change randomly and back we go.
Of course, the assignments certainly don't propagate to computers in classrooms so some of the calls are urgent 'I'm trying to give a presentation'. And let's not even get started on U3 technology...
Oh, I forgot to mention, they don't have rights to assign drive letters so even if we could give them a sheet of instructions...
Windows is fundamentally designed around a static configuration of systems that is homogeneous as far as hardware and software and customizations goes, which has a 1:1 relationship between users and computers,and which never, ever changes. Anything that strays from that model tends to break stuff. Users who go from computer to computer, accounts with customized access, USB fobs, notebooks -- all tend to make things Not Work -- especially when you lock down adminstrator access.
Feh.
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