Drive letters suck

Tue 25-Aug-2009 in english, geek | 9 comments

Update: Most of the problems i whined about below seem to have a simple solution in the comments. If you change drive letters for a device using the Disk manager, the letter designation sticks. Virtual machines fail out of the box because configuration files refer to virtual hard disk files using absolute paths, those config files are pure XML and can easily be edited. Whoa.

I have a small bunch of external hard drives. Some i use at work, some i use privately, and many of which i use on a single day. One drive in particular has my digital photos [0], which i connect when i want to work with those.

The problem is that the hard disk may or may not retain the drive letter from one time to the other. Especially when i’ve used the computer with a bunch of other external hard disks, which happens a lot at work since i keep my virtual machines on external media [1]. But what this does is screw up my photo management software, since it expects the pictures to be on g:\Pictures and not, like they in fact were, on i:\Pictures. To make things worse, the two-partition photo brick i had connected in fact did have a g: assigned, so i managed to import a bunch of photos to the same disk but the wrong partition.

To move the pictures within the photo management software, i did something natural which turned out to be stupid. I asked it to open another set of folders. Which the software proceeded to merge into its database, thus moving all my previous 24227 pictures from where they were to where were, except from my photo management software’s point of view. And after my next reboot i’ll probably have to do it again.

The particular problem would of course go away if i didn’t do personal photo management on my work laptop, but i’d still get insulted by Windows each time a virtual machine has disappeared from the catalogue just because the drive letter designation has changed. The point still holds.

So i suggest to you dear Windows developers: give us users a simple way to identify our hard disks by a label instead of a drive letter. To keep things in tune with ye olde drive lettering scheme, the drives could be accessed as <label>: in addition to the old <letter>: and i could finally find my digital photos on the photos:\ drive, regardless of which drive letter that drive would happen to be mapped to this time.

[0] OK, backup copies of my photos are scattered unevenly across a few other of the hard drives, but that’s another story[1] My most used ones are on a flash stick, a practice i can wholeheartedly recommend. The startup time is so much swifter from solid state than from spinning metal.

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  2. llauren’s avatar

    llauren on Tue 25-Aug-2009 at 22:58

    Amen. Photo management is supposed to be really nice on Macs too. Aperture or Lightroom?

  3. asmand’s avatar

    asmand on Wed 26-Aug-2009 at 10:41

    Isn’t it possible to make an external drive always get the same drive letter? In disk management under computer management you can choose to change drive letter. That drive letter should be assigned to the drive each time it is plugged in. P: for photos?

  4. llauren’s avatar

    llauren on Wed 26-Aug-2009 at 11:43

    Interesting! While Microsoft’s KB article 307884 only suggests that it’s possible to change the drive letter assignments, Mitch Tulloch suggests that doing so will make the drive letters persistent! I did not know that.

  5. Kent’s avatar

    Kent on Thu 27-Aug-2009 at 10:30

    What asmand recommend works. I use that all the time whenever I need to stick to one same drive letter.

  6. llauren’s avatar

    llauren on Thu 27-Aug-2009 at 15:53

    I tried naming the flash drive i have for virtual machines to v:. That didn’t work out of the box, since the virtual machine config files point to an absolute path for the VHD images. But hey presto! They are in XML, so it’s just a case text editing, and life is good again.

  7. Michael’s avatar

    Michael on Sun 24-Jan-2010 at 13:06

    You should try Linux. On Linux, all devices are mounted as /media/. This means that as long as you don’t change the name of the device, it always gets the same mount point whenever you plug it in. Also, there are some great photo-management applications for Linux, such as Digikam. The best part is, though, everything is free.

  8. llauren’s avatar

    llauren on Mon 25-Jan-2010 at 18:35

    Hi Michael and good to see somebody else than me suggesting Linux as a more user friendly platform than Windows :) . I do use Linux quite a bit. In fact, i’m writing this on my Linux laptop.

    Linux does have a problem similar to Windows though; if a volume (disk partition) does not have a label (a name), it will be mounted as /media/disk. And if you have several unlabelled volumes, they’ll be mounted as /media/disk, /media/disk-1, /media/disk-2 etc., in a somewhat unpredictable fashion. The remedy of course is to have names on volumes, like it’s possible to give persistent drive letters on Windows using the Disk Manager. Linux Benefit so to speak is that the volumes will be mounted with the same names each time on any computer you use, whereas the drive letters will persist only on one computer.

    I used to use Digikam quite a bit a few years back but i lost touch with the application. While i don’t think Digikam will be as versatile as Lightroom, i think i do owe Digikam a revisit, just for old times’ sake.

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