Unavailable drive letters in Control Panel|Computer Management|Storage

[jsallen]

I removed some external hard drives when working on my computer and when I replaced them, they had different drive letters. Now some of the drive letters I had used before are not in the list of available ones even though these letters are not currently in use and I restarted the computer. I MUST be able to restore the drive letters so that paths will be correct and so my Seagate FreeAgent drive will find the drives to update backups. The computer does have some (Linux) partitions which do not have any drive letters assigned in Windows, maybe this has something to do with it? Help please!

[jsallen]

So, now I disconnected all but one drive, which the computer assigned to drive G but I want it to be drive F. The letter F does appear now in the list and I go to change the drive letter. The drive is churning away and then after a few minutes I get the message that the letter G is already in use and will not be usable again until I restart the computer. More churning. Finally, the drive is assigned to F. Probably I will have to do this for the other three drives. I think the trick to aovid these problems may be to reinstall drives one at a time in alphabetical order.

[Just Plain Fred]

So, now I disconnected all but one drive, which the computer assigned to drive G but I want it to be drive F. The letter F does appear now in the list and I go to change the drive letter. I think the trick to aovid these problems may be to reinstall drives one at a time in alphabetical order.

js,
Hello... I f you go to "Disk Management" you can then "Right Click" on each drive and and choose to change "Drive Letter Assignment" Except for the drive that your booted into ...that's going to be always C: Regards Fred

[jsallen]

Ah yes, I did that but some of the letters were missing from the alphabetical list even though no drive used those letters, *and* I had restarted the computer. Now after disconnecting the drives, then reconnecting them one by one in alphabetical order with restarts between each one, I got the drive letters back as they were before. One eSATA drive wasn't recognized when I turned it on with the computer already running but was recognized when I restarted.

[Just Plain Fred]

Ah yes, I did that but some of the letters were missing from the alphabetical list even though no drive used those letters, *and* I had restarted the computer. Now after disconnecting the drives, then reconnecting them one by one in alphabetical order with restarts between each one, I got the drive letters back as they were before. One eSATA drive wasn't recognized when I turned it on with the computer already running but was recognized when I restarted.

js,
Hello.... The letters may have been in use by "SD slots", CD/DVD RW ,or removable drives...Regards Fred

[Infinicore]

The trick is to assign external drives letters further along in the alphabet, if there is room, which in most systems, there is.
In other words if internals are C thru G or H, then assign the first external K, then maybe M and a third, O. That way if say K is ever disconnected or turned off for any reason and a flash drive or some other temporary connection is made to a storage device, it is assigned the letter I and a second one, J...K remains unaffected and still available when the drive assigned to it is reconnected or turned back on.