I had a situation in where I have to store some very large backups on USB drives and they are rotated daily. If I wanted to use backup Exec but run more than one concurrent job at a time I could not put the drives in a pool and instead just assign a new “backup to disk” device. For example, one backup to disk device I have assigned to a folder on drive letter F. The problem came when switching the drives the next day. Windows would see the new drive but would not assign it the drive letter F because it just had a drive with the same drive letter attached even though it has been removed. This forced me to have to go in to device manager and manually change the drive letters…. annoying. to get around this I resorted to righting a few scripts which worked for the most part unless a volume name changed or or volume number was changed to something unpredictable. But than I came across a program that solved the problem. USBDLM has the ability to look at the Device ID which is much more reliable than volume names or numbers and then based your the setting provided will assign the drive letter when detected.

Here is the discription that the website provides…
“USBDLM” is a Windows service that gives control over Window’s drive letter assignment for USB drives. Running as service makes it independent of the logged on user’s privileges, so there is no need to give the users the privilege to change drive letters.
It automatically solves conflicts between USB drives and network or subst drives of the currently logged on user.
Furthermore you can define new default letters for USB drives and much more.”

Try it out

Posted in Other Tech
Tags: assign, automatically, drive letters, USBDLM