Windows assigns drive letters on a first come, first serve basis. If you want to maintain a certain letter, make sure you turn on all your external drives in the same order each time.
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=115074\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
Not necessarily. Go to Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management and right click on the hard drives you wish to change the drive letters and select change Drive Letter, click change and select the letter you wish to be attached. After a reboot those drives will keep the letters assigned.
If you are assigning a letter that was previously used by a drive you just changed, it won't be free again until after a reboot.
I did this a few days ago as I added 4 more drives to the main machine, which already had 3 desktop drives attached and sometime 2 laptop ext. drives.
The 'Images' internal drive gets I, the 'Photos and Design' internal drive gets P
I just added 4 500G ext to my 3 250G ext drives and assigned letter than made sense to me, so the 2 LaCies got R+S, T+U [R+S being the 10G swap files at start of those Ext drives], the 2 WD drives got U+V, the 2 Buffalos got X+Y and the single 250G got Q. Now when I start machine up, no matter what order things get turned on, the ext. the HDs are always in the same place, with the same letter.
They also get named, in this case Buffalo 1+2, MyBook 1+2, Brick 1+2 to aid knowing what is what and where.
EDIT - This technique works slightly better than the method Francofit posted just before mine. And you can do them all at once too. I used to use Francofit's technique before I discovered the
joys of Disk Management.
No problems with unplugging either if you have safely remove drives software enabled.