Windows – How to permently assign (reserve) drive letter to SATA Hard Disks which will be mostly turned off (offline)

drive-letterhard drivesatawindows 7

I have following setup:

C: System, programs and most frequently used data
D: Optical Drive
E: Virtual Drive
four SATA disks which I turn off using HDD switcher.
F: SATA Hard Disk - Data disk - installation files, music, some data.
G: SATA Hard Disk - Movies
H: SATA Hard Disk - Movies
I: SATA Hard Disk - Offline data, some backup, disk is rarely turned on.
J: IDE Hard Disk - Used for Windows backup (C and F disk) (It can't be turned off)
K: Printer SSD card slot
L: Printer USB slot
M: USB devices

Now the problem is when I turn off disks usually they lose drive letter. This especially happens when all disks are turned off and I plug in some USB device even though I set USB to M: it still changes it to lowest letter by some reason. This happens as well when F disk is turned off and I turn on G disk, it changes to F. Because of this I rarely now turn off F disk because it will cause problems when backup day comes and I don't see point to change backup disk from IDE to SATA because of this.

So is there a way to permanently assign (reserve) drive letters?

Best Answer

You have to assign the drive a letter in disk management. Control Panel->Administrator Tools->Computer Management-> Disc Management is @ the bottom.

Or you can run this command to open it: diskmgmt.msc

You can select the drive and the drive letter that you want to set that drive to. Even if you removed the drive from the machine, once you plug it back up, it will still have the same drive letter.

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USB Drive Letter Manager is your friend :)

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Try booting to the recovery console with your install CD (which is a recovery disk), without the IDE disk connected (thanks Neal), and doing:

bootrec /fixmbr
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You will, of course, want the SATA drive set in the BIOS as a (probably the primary) boot device.

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