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Windows 10 insists on changing the USB drive letter I chose to its' choice.

Snookred 1 Reputation point
2021-04-15T15:01:09.417+00:00

I've always been able to choose a drive letter for a USB drive that Windows will retain/remember and continue to use when that drive is connected. This includes Windows 10. However, just recently this stopped working on Windows 10. This is an important capability for certain drives.

I have some suspicion that the problem could be related to a recent desire to replace such a drive with a new one. In that, a drive formerly using this drive letter is removed and replaced by a new one. When removing the old drive Disk Management was used to remove the drive letter. When the new drive was connected Disk Management was used again to assign the previously used drive letter to the new drive. While Disk Management behaved inconsistently I was able to get the drive letter assigned to the new drive. However, when the computer is shutdown & rebooted that assignment goes away and Windows seems to assign the drive letter in the manner it would for a device that never had a drive letter assigned via Disk Management. Having to rerun Disk Management every time the computer is rebooted is quite annoying.

Would be grateful for any ideas about how to rectify this failure?

Windows for business | Windows Client for IT Pros | User experience | Other

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  1. Docs 16,226 Reputation points
    2021-04-15T19:28:00.09+00:00

    This third party application may allow more customization:

    If you change a drive letter of USB flash drive that is not currently plugged, this flash drive will get the drive letter that you choose on the next time that you plug it.

    https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/drive_letter_view.html

    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/disk-management/change-a-drive-letter

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  2. Snookred 1 Reputation point
    2021-04-15T20:44:40.113+00:00

    DriveLetterView looks like an interesting utility. Thanks for the referral.

    I've now done a little more troubleshooting and pretty well determined that the problem pertains to the SD Card reader on the computer where I am running Windows 10. The same SD Cards that fail when inserted in the card reader work fine when connected using an SD Card adapter. Likewise, all SD Cards fail in the SD Card reader even though they work fine on another computer with an SD Card reader (although that one ins running Win7).

    While Windows 10 blue screen crashes shouldn't happen it does appear that the card reader does have something to do with causing the problem.

  3. Snookred 1 Reputation point
    2021-04-17T19:49:31.217+00:00

    Actually it might be more correct to say that the problem is a bit more isolated than I originally thought. A little more nuance has been discovered.

    The same issue was posted to the Dell (provider of subject SD Card Reader) community. Discussion can be found here.

    It remains to be determined whether or NOT this is a Windows 10 problem or a Dell computer (driver etc.) problem. I don't have the means to further troubleshoot. Would like to know if same problem occurs on a different brand of computer with Windows 10.

    However, this has also lead to discover of other problems related to USB drive letter assignment on my Windows 10 computer. I'll post that separately.

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  4. Docs 16,226 Reputation points
    2021-04-17T23:45:28.873+00:00
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