> >>Another comment about the drive letter E: you've chosen: >> >>- most computers these days have a C: hard drive and a D: optical drive >>- therefore, nominally the next available drive letter is E: >> >>However, if you do this it can cause problems with USB memory sticks or hard drives the user may want to attach to the workstation. When they do so the stick or HD will by default be mapped as drive E:, which will then be inaccessible because a network drive mapping has already overridden it. >> >>For this reason it's better to start mapped network drives further down the alphabet, leaving some space for more local devices. Some admins start network drive mappings at Z: and work backwards from there. > >Hi Al, > >Maybe I'm missing something but Windows is smart enough to assign next avaialable letter to removable USB devices.
So you might think, but I've seen this exact scenario many times with Windows XP (none of my clients are yet on Vista so I don't know if it happens with Vista). When it happens there are 2 main options:
1. Temporarily un-map the network E: drive. Now the local USB device appears as E:, you can copy files to/from it etc. Then remove the USB drive and re-map the network drive E:.
2. Go into Disk Management and assign it a different drive letter there. This works fine but it makes me really nervous getting end users to use this tool as they can do so much damage with a false move.
Once a USB device has been configured with a different drive letter on a particular computer (say, drive Z:), Windows will always re-mount that volume with the same drive letter when it's reattached in the future. So, the problem only occurs when attaching USB mass storage devices to a computer for the first time.
Regards. Al
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