Drive letter probs (ADVANCED!!)

[Ed_S]

OK, I guess I deserve this one!

I've often answered others drive letter Q's & consider myself pretty good at it. Now I've got one I can't beat!!

Recently changed my CD-R drive, installed a new Teac 16-10-40. Now the CD drive letters will NOT remain constant, instead they change with every boot no matter what I do in Device Mangler.

System drives, as they've been for a LONG time:

C = Drive one, primary
D = Drive two, primary (single partition)
E = Drive three, primary
F, G, H, I = Logical drives, HD#1
J, K, L, M = Logical drives, HD#3

N, O, P, Q = 4 disc CD changer
R = CD-R drive
S = 40X CD drive

Z = External parallel Zip drive

====
Since changing the drive, HD's remain as was. CD's jump around, as I said changing settings in Device Manager has no lasting effect, does change them as specified for ONE boot only.

So my question is this: How, preferably in the registry, do I HARD SET the drive letter assignments so that Windows absolutely. positively CANNOT alter the settings!! I would rather see it crash than have it make changes w/o my specific OK!!

No hardware change was made other than swapping drives, new is set to slave same as old.
OS is '95B.

Since the letters won't stay, I can't get ANY burner software working right. Every try results in a reboot, which changes them, then start over... AARRRGGG!!!!!

Ready to throw this drive out the window, I've been at this for over 6 hrs now!!

[Ed_S]

PS - CD Letters do always remain above the HD's highest letter (M), but other than than anything could happen. Sometimes the 40X and CDRW are N - O, other times T and W (skipping u & v), and sometimes they even get in between whatever letters are assigned to the !@#$% changer!!

Zip has constantly been a higher letter than everything else, but does NOT remain at Z, usually (but not always) takes the next letter after whatever CD is last at the moment...

[OuTpaTienT]

Just is just a shot in the dark, but have you tried setting the value in the bios "plug n play OS installed" to NO?

[Ed_S]

Good thought, Out, and one I hadn't tried yet today! Until now, that is. Changed it, rebooted. Change the letter assignments to upper letters, thus freeing up the ones needed. Reboot. Changed them to correct letters. Rebooted. All as it should be this boot.
Reboot (to test). Scrambled again. http://www.sysopt.com/forum/frown.gif

VERY frustrating, since every attempt means changing SIX drives twice and rebooting three times total just to see if it worked!!!

[rlpos]

In one of the earlier post about letter assignments someone posted a link on a utility that lets you assign which letters go to what devices. The program was called "letter assigner" or something like that but I don't remember where I downloaded it. It is only about 1 meg and seems to work well. It might be your ticket. If you like I can email it to you. ah! heres the link; http://www.v72735.f2s.com/LetAssig/



[This message has been edited by rlpos (edited 06-03-2001).]

[Ed_S]

Might try that. I looked at it before & it seems like a util to speed up the process, but doesn't really do it differently. I'll download it, we'll see. Appreciate the suggestion, rlpos!

How about a way within DOS autoexec to assign the drive's letters?
I know it's done via the /L: switch on the MSCDEX command, but the snytax specifies:
/L:letter - Specifies the drive letter to assign to the first CD-ROM drive. If you have more than one CD-ROM drive, MS-DOS assigns additional CD-ROM drives
subsequent available driver letters.
(Source: Easydos (http://www.easydos.com/mscdex.html) )
So, this appears to leave no room to assign the letters to SPECIFIC hardware.

Hmm, wonder if I could use differing device drivers in Config.sys, then use multiple MSCDEX commands in autoexec...
But then, how to define which device uses what driver?...Hmmm....
(Yes, everything DID work in dos too, and yes, I do still use it...)

Last thing I've done was yanked out the changer altogether. At least I can try to get the software working w/o the drive problem interfering!!

[This message has been edited by Ed_S (edited 06-03-2001).]