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Author Topic: Firewire drives sometimes change their drive lette  (Read 3116 times)

colourperfect

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Firewire drives sometimes change their drive lette
« on: April 30, 2007, 04:26:50 pm »

Hi,

My windows system sometimes changes the letters of my firewire (maxtor) external drives that I use to store Lightroom images on.

I have tried to 'hard wire' them to be specific letters, however sometimes the system ignores this. Its to do with the order they are powered on - I sometimes need to re-cycle the power on one of them if I turn them both on at the same time to make sure both are recognised.

Anyway .... if the drive letter has changed Lightroom cant see the images which I can understand. But it doesnt seem to offer the feature to allow me to swap the letter around.

Any suggestions ?

thanks
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timhurst

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Firewire drives sometimes change their drive lette
« Reply #1 on: April 30, 2007, 04:46:39 pm »

Quote
Hi,

My windows system sometimes changes the letters of my firewire (maxtor) external drives that I use to store Lightroom images on.

I have tried to 'hard wire' them to be specific letters, however sometimes the system ignores this. Its to do with the order they are powered on - I sometimes need to re-cycle the power on one of them if I turn them both on at the same time to make sure both are recognised.

Anyway .... if the drive letter has changed Lightroom cant see the images which I can understand. But it doesnt seem to offer the feature to allow me to swap the letter around.

Any suggestions ?

thanks
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=115050\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


I wondered about this as well, but for now I'm working with internal drives only with LR. In windows you can change the drive letter after power up using the Computer Management tool under Administrative Tools but it's slow to do.

I would hope that LR will become a bit smarter in this respect and be able to search for the correct drive if multiples are loaded. Simply leaving a tag file on the hard drive root, so it can recognise it, would do the trick.
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61Dynamic

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Firewire drives sometimes change their drive lette
« Reply #2 on: April 30, 2007, 06:06:23 pm »

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.
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francofit

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Firewire drives sometimes change their drive lette
« Reply #3 on: April 30, 2007, 06:39:42 pm »

Quote
Hi,

My windows system sometimes changes the letters of my firewire (maxtor) external drives that I use to store Lightroom images on.

I have tried to 'hard wire' them to be specific letters, however sometimes the system ignores this. Its to do with the order they are powered on - ..........
...
Any suggestions ?

thanks
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=115050\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Time ago I think I found the solution and up-to-today it seems to work fine on my XP both with Firewire and USB external drives, independently of the sequence of starting them up.
The solution consists in making them work the same as internal HD.
You have to go to the Hardware properties of the interested drive,
here is an easy if not quick route:

- right click on the HD letter Properties
- select the Hardware tab
- select the drive you want to make the letter(s) defined once for all
- click the button Properties, another window will pop up
- select the tab Criteria (I am translating from the Italian, I hope this is the right translation)
- FINALLY, choose Optimize Performance, then OK: you are done.

I think I have adopted the above approach since more than one year ago and never I had to struggle again about drive letter conflicts with different application vs different times of starting up the various components.
Hope it works also for you.

Ciao
Franco

P.S.: after that change of course you have to pay more attention about how you disconnect the HD: use always the "safe Removal" button before disconnecting or powering down the external drive!
« Last Edit: April 30, 2007, 06:59:45 pm by francofit »
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Franco

jjj

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Firewire drives sometimes change their drive lette
« Reply #4 on: April 30, 2007, 07:05:58 pm »

Quote
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.
« Last Edit: April 30, 2007, 07:11:13 pm by jjj »
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francofit

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Firewire drives sometimes change their drive lette
« Reply #5 on: April 30, 2007, 07:32:17 pm »

Quote
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.
.....
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=115081\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Very good. Next time I add a new disk I will try your approach.
Thanks
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Franco

61Dynamic

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Firewire drives sometimes change their drive lette
« Reply #6 on: April 30, 2007, 09:52:24 pm »

jjj,

Do the drives maintain their letters if you turn them on in different orders while windows is running? For example, while Win is up and running, turn off all the external drives and then turn them back on in mixed order.

Or are you only turning them on at the same time you are turning on the computer?
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