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General discussionTechnical assistance required(5 posts)solved(5 posts)solved
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Posted August 24, 2016
Hi all

My PC goes mad every now and then and reassigns different letters (H: to I: etc.) to the various external drives I have plugged into it. This results in all the shortcuts, e.g. to my gog games that I installed to an external HDD to save space on C:, to stop working. I looked but could not find a way to manually restore the original letters. Could someone here please tell me how to go about it? And maybe how to prevent it from happening again in future? I'm running in Vista, if that is relevant.
This question / problem has been solved by RWarehallimage
Posted August 24, 2016
avatar
musteriuz: Hi all

My PC goes mad every now and then and reassigns different letters (H: to I: etc.) to the various external drives I have plugged into it. This results in all the shortcuts, e.g. to my gog games that I installed to an external HDD to save space on C:, to stop working. I looked but could not find a way to manually restore the original letters. Could someone here please tell me how to go about it? And maybe how to prevent it from happening again in future? I'm running in Vista, if that is relevant.
http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/assign-permanent-drive-letters-to-a-removable-usb-drive-in-windows/

You can assign a permanent drive letter. Haven't done it in awhile, but a quick search found the above guide.
Posted August 24, 2016
avatar
musteriuz: Hi all

My PC goes mad every now and then and reassigns different letters (H: to I: etc.) to the various external drives I have plugged into it. This results in all the shortcuts, e.g. to my gog games that I installed to an external HDD to save space on C:, to stop working. I looked but could not find a way to manually restore the original letters. Could someone here please tell me how to go about it? And maybe how to prevent it from happening again in future? I'm running in Vista, if that is relevant.
Yes, the problem is with USB drives, is that Windows doesn't know what is going to be plugged into them. you could pull those drives out and mix them up, plug them in different ports each time. So it just assigns the drive letters as it finds it. Its an annoyance, however I wouldn't generally recommend using an external HDD to run games off of, wouldn't last very long with all the read traffic. HDD's are dirt cheap nowadays, and will drop further as SSD's get bigger and cheaper. I would suggest an SSD with Win + Apps installed primary drive, then a 1 or 2gb HDD for other stuff.
Also, you don't have to keep your games installed. You can download the installer files and then store them to an external drive - this is what I do, only install what I actually use at the time (most games here only take a minute or two to install), then I have backup drives offline to store the installers and other goodies.
Oh, and as a final note, move to Win7 or 10 or even XP. Vista is just dreadful, you must be a true martyr to still be using it :o)
Posted August 25, 2016
avatar
musteriuz: Hi all

My PC goes mad every now and then and reassigns different letters (H: to I: etc.) to the various external drives I have plugged into it. This results in all the shortcuts, e.g. to my gog games that I installed to an external HDD to save space on C:, to stop working. I looked but could not find a way to manually restore the original letters. Could someone here please tell me how to go about it? And maybe how to prevent it from happening again in future? I'm running in Vista, if that is relevant.
avatar
RWarehall: http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/assign-permanent-drive-letters-to-a-removable-usb-drive-in-windows/

You can assign a permanent drive letter. Haven't done it in awhile, but a quick search found the above guide.
Thanks, the steps listed there resolved my problem. I really appreciate you taking the time to help out.
avatar
nightcraw1er.488: Yes, the problem is with USB drives, is that Windows doesn't know what is going to be plugged into them. you could pull those drives out and mix them up, plug them in different ports each time. So it just assigns the drive letters as it finds it. Its an annoyance, however I wouldn't generally recommend using an external HDD to run games off of, wouldn't last very long with all the read traffic. HDD's are dirt cheap nowadays, and will drop further as SSD's get bigger and cheaper. I would suggest an SSD with Win + Apps installed primary drive, then a 1 or 2gb HDD for other stuff.
Also, you don't have to keep your games installed. You can download the installer files and then store them to an external drive - this is what I do, only install what I actually use at the time (most games here only take a minute or two to install), then I have backup drives offline to store the installers and other goodies.
Oh, and as a final note, move to Win7 or 10 or even XP. Vista is just dreadful, you must be a true martyr to still be using it :o)
Thanks also to you for your suggestions. I'll need a new PC to go to Win7 or newer and that is not likely to happen anytime soon. One of my older PCs still runs XP, but this is my main current gaming rig and I really needed to get this issue resolved. Thanks to the other respondent that was done.
Post edited August 25, 2016 by musteriuz
Posted August 25, 2016
In case anyone runs into a similar issue under Linux:

In the /etc/fstab file, you can specify the UUID of a partition, rather than the device name.

(Modern Linux distributions do this by default, but this may be useful if you ever have to edit fstab manually.)
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General discussionTechnical assistance required(5 posts)solved(5 posts)solved
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