Control those USB drive letters
In the September 2008 newsletter I introduced USBDLM (USB Drive Letter Manager) …
The name is something of a mouthfull! It stands for USB Drive Letter Manager which may only give a vague hint as to what it can do for you.
USBDLM can be downloaded from - http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbdlm_e.html
It runs as a service on Windows XP (I can’t vouch for it on anything else but it says it runs on 2000 & Vista) and provides a vast range of controls on the assignment of drive letters to USB devices.
Why would you want this?
I’m not going to duplicate the documentation but rather show how to solve some likely scenarios. The full help file can be read online at - http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbdlm_help_e.html
If you work in an environment with lots of networked drives, you will have found the annoying habit that Windows has of assigning a USB device to a drive letter that is already in use, there’s one scenario where it may be helpful.
You can restrict USB drives to a subset of the drive letter with configuration lines like this:
[DriveLetters]
Letter1=U
Letter2=Y
Letter3=Z
So only those three letters will be used by USB devices.
Do you have a multi-slot card reader? Do you find it tricky to work out which of the four drive letters has your card in it? USBDLMK can solve that problem for you.
These two configuratiuon lines will ensure that only the slot with a card in it is given a drive letter:
[Settings]
NoMediaNoLetter=1
Do you have a multi-slot card reader built into your system? Have you accidentally dismounted it from the system tray and found you have to reboot to get the use of the card reader back? USBDLM can hide your built-in card reader from the system tray icon.
Two lines like:
[HideFromSafelyRemoveHardware]
DeviceID1=Multi Flash Reader
but you will probably need to read the help file to ensure the DeviceID is right.
If you dislike drive letters then USBDLM can also map a USB drive onto a folder (an empty folder of that name must exist) on an NTFS file system (not on FAT file system). For example:
[DriveLetters]
Letter1=C:\USB\%VolumeLabel%
Assumes you have a folder called USB on your C drive. USB devices appear as folders within it using the USB device’s volume label as the subfolder name.
Conditional assignments can also be done. For example:
[DriveLetters10]
VolumeLabel1=PEDBAK?
Letter1=C:\PEDBAK
Note the wildcard on the volume label and that C:\PEDBAK must be kept as an empty folder on your (NTFS) file system. Now when you plug in a memory stick with volume label of PEDBAK1, PEDBAK2 or PEDBAK3, it will automatically appear as the PEDBAK folder on your C drive.