How to stop Windows 10 from automatically re-mapping my external hard drives to a different letter?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Murrin26
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Murrin26

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I am on Windows 10 on a laptop, Lenovo Legion Y540


I use several external hard drives. But now Windows keeps mapping the hard drives to a different letter. I have an important folder in Quick Access on one of those external hard drives, but when Windows changes the drive letter from D to F, now the pinned shortcut in quick access does not work. Plus there are other programs that rely on certain drive paths. I'll lay out the steps of this situation.


I have 2 external hard drives. We'll call them Drives #1 and #2.


1) When I first attached these 2 hard drives my computer, this is what Windows assigned. Drive 1 was mapped to F. Drive 2 was mapped to E. I'm fine with that.


2) I got a brand new hard drive to replace Drive 2. So I plugged in the existing "Drive 2", as well as the brand new hard drive. I transferred the stuff over from "Drive 2" to the "new Drive 2".


3) After that was all done, I eventually just had Drive 1 and "new Drive 2" plugged in. I noticed that, basically, Drive 1 and Drive 2(new drive), now the drive letters were switched! Why did that happen? Why did the new drive steal the "F" name from Drive 1? Anyway, so then I used the "Create and format hard disk partitions" tool to switch the letters back. So "new Drive 2" is back to "E" like it's supposed to be, and Drive 1 is back to "F".


4) After that, I changed Drive 1 to "D". This was because on my old computer, the data in these folders was in a drive of letter "D", so I thought maybe it would fix some of the old shortcuts. So I changed it to D and everything was good.


5) Then I shut down the computer, and then unplugged the external hard drives. Later on I turned on the computer, inserted the new Drive 2, and then inserted one of my other backup drives. I then noticed that the backup drive was automatically re-pathed to D, even though that other Drive already was assigned to D (drive 1 was).


It looks like if I get a brand new hard drive and connect it to the computer, it could steal any of the existing drive letters. Is there a fix for this?


Thanks


additional tags: change drive letters, harddrive, hdd, portable external hard drive, hard disk

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