Whats the easiest way to permanently assign a drive letter to a USB thumb drive? I have searched this but most of the solutions have been about creating batch files or scripts. Is there a simple program available that will assign a letter permanently to my thumb drives or some other method that will do it?

Have a read here Anthony

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?art...1676&page=9

I read many similar solutions but that is for giving your USB drive a permanent letter on a specific machine so every time that drive is plugged in to your home machine for example the machine assigns is a specific letter.

What I want to do is make the USB thumb drive have a permanent letter on any machine I use it on. So I need to find a way to make the thumb drive always be "x" or "f" or what ever letter I am going to go with.

There are several sites that recommend batch files that will run when the drive is plugged in and assign a letter to it. I am hoping there is a simple program that will do all this for you.

Ahh I see. No idea, but will see if I can find anything. Or perhaps someone else may know.

Sounds tricky!

I don't think you can with a flash/thumb drive Anthony it just assigns the next free drive letter when you plug it in. You can with CD Roms in Win98SE but I haven't seen this option on WinXP.

One of the challenges in this scenario is that you might need the drive letter to always be "G:\", but if you could permanently assign that drive letter to the USB drive and then insert it into another host computer that already has a "G:\ drive, then your USB drive would not be recognized.

Windows XP does not support relative paths. I'm not sure what the ultimate goal for the drive letter needing to fixed (static) is, but you might want to check out the portability features of XYplorer. The Standard License is $30, the Lifetime is $60, and you are allowed to install it on as many devices as you want.

I wish this could be done too. I have all my stuff on various external drives and the letters change depending which of my computers i plug them in to, which is annoying. I don't just leave them plugged in and on as I like to keep all my personal stuff away from the internet when surfing so if i get any problems and have to reinstall i dont lose anything.

Interesting topic.

I want to do this because I have a large collection of portable apps that I run off my thumb drive. Most of them if installed into the Portable Apps.com start menu work as they should not matter what the thumb drive letter is. I am also using Rocket Dock portably and with a little tweaking of paths it will recognize all the apps on the dock no matter what the drive letter is. The problem is with the Stack Docklet. I point it to a folder on the thumb drive and in that folder I put short cuts to other programs. Problem is the short cuts will not let me modify the path. Windows say it's not valid. This wouldn't be a problem if I could keep the drive letter the same. I wouldn't have to modify the path to keep it relative.

As for having a problem with a fixed drive letter conflicting when on a machine that has that drive letter already assigned to something else I would use something like Z or Q and probably would not have an issue.

You could make a truecrypt file on it and put the things in it. Then use the traveler disk setup on it and set the drive letter as z or something. I edited my autorun.inf to just add 3 options to the context menu of the drive.

Using Truecrypt was something I read about when researching how to do this. If I remember correctly you have to have admin privileges on the machine you will be using the thumb drive on.