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Force USB Drives to use Drive Letter X

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Ath:
Uhm, would mounting the USB drive into a subdirectory, as you can do using Disk management, be feasible? I use it to have all my USB sticks (several brands in several capacities) in 1 subdirectory (0-USBdrives) of my harddisk, and it never connects wrong. The 0 is in the name to have it on top of the directorylist for easy discovery when using Explorer.

Stoic Joker:
Uhm, would mounting the USB drive into a subdirectory, as you can do using Disk management, be feasible? I use it to have all my USB sticks (several brands in several capacities) in 1 subdirectory (0-USBdrives) of my harddisk, and it never connects wrong. The 0 is in the name to have it on top of the directorylist for easy discovery when using Explorer.-Ath (June 14, 2011, 01:35 AM)
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That was one of the first things I tried. However you can only mount one drive at a time to any given directory. Which means you'll end up with 5 targets. So...

Unfortunately no, thanks to Symantec's refusal to pole the media pool for the active target/device before running the backup. Which is after all the whole point of having a pool of media to select from. If you restart all the Backup Exec services it will do exactly that (pole the pool), and nail the correct device every time. But that's insanely impractical to do before every backup.

narf41:
I know this is necro'ing a super old thread, but I couldn't find an answer anywhere online and so once figuring it out I wanted anyone else who stumbled across this to get a solution.

You can clonezilla one of the drives onto another drive. There's also likely a fancy way of doing it by cloning the volume guid but clonezilla worked for my purposes so I didn't look into it.

What I can verify for you is that it does not come from the disk id so modifying this via diskpart is not helpful, and that you can get volume guid's using powershell: GWMI -namespace root\cimv2 -class win32_volume Hopefully somebody smarter than me can figure out how to change or specify volume guid and test it out or at least determine if this is indeed where the reg value comes from so we can dynamically do this without cloning entire drives.

How it works: When you assign a drive letter to a drive windows stores this in the registry under the key hklm\system\mounteddevices. You can observe that when you assign a new drive the X letter (for example) the data portion for the reg_binary (\dosdevices\x: in this case) is overwritten with the new drive and you can't have multiple entries with different values, so the next time you plug in that old drive it won't be X anymore.

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