Thursday, February 24, 2011

US B bugging me... no more!

Dear Diary,
Here's a turn up for the books.

Following up on yesterday's little SyncBack fiasco I was trying to determine why my PC is no longer on speaking terms with my external hard drive.  It seemed to be down to an incident involving laundry, specifically a row over lost socks and who owns the the un-claimed third sock.  That or it was due to the mysterious USB error 'Code 10' which as far as I can tell simply means, "It aint working".  No duh!

So I opened up Device Manager, right clicked on the offending 'Unknown Device' and selected 'Uninstall'.  Then I disconnected the External drive, waited a minute and re-connected it.  Voila!  At least for now... we'll see how long it lasts.

Then I had a brainwave, "Self.. ", I thought, ".. I wonder if we can make Windows assign a fixed drive letter for this device?  There must be a way surely: that's how network drives stay mapped after all".  Google as always is my friend and sure enough it is possible to assign a consistent drive letter to a USB drive.  Thank you 'Dallas Bill' from two years ago and a thousand miles away, thank you Tim Berners-Lee for the World Wide Web and thank you Google!

Now I'm off to play around with drive letters and backup settings.

Happy Monkey.  :)

2 comments:

  1. Have you been able to test this yet? I'm curious if it works.
    I keep meaning to do something similar on my Linux computer. My understanding is that disks have a UUID (unique identifier), & you can map that UUID to a certain mount point, so it mounts there every time. Note to self....

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  2. Yes, I used the Disk Management tool outlined in that thread to assign fixed drive letters to both my permanently connected external hard drive and two of my USB thumb drives. All settings have worked fine over the last couple of days after multiple reboots and, in the case of the thumb drives, multiple inserts / removals. All peachy keen! :)

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