Assign a permanent drive letter across different computers

I'm creating a USB drive that includes several shortcuts to files within the same USB to save space and avoid duplicate files.

Obviously for this to work, it requires the letter of the drive to remain consistent.

Is it possible to keep the letter of a usb drive the same across different computers? If so, how?

Also, would it be possible to automate this? (i.e., you simply plug in the usb and it automatically assigns the drive letter). It will be used by people who are not necessarily computer literate so avoiding going into "Create and Format Disk Partitions" or having to click on a .cmd file, or something, would be ideal.

Jeremy

Posted 2019-03-05T22:34:40.763

Reputation: 11

This would require Auto Run to function on the computers in some way, and no modern OS allows this, for very obvious security reasons. – music2myear – 2019-03-05T22:41:27.217

This might do what you want, but would have to be installed on each system and configured. free for personal use....https://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbdlm_e.html

– Moab – 2019-03-05T23:13:04.340

I think your problem can be solved giving relative path to your shortcut file. Refer this https://sumtips.com/how-to/create-shortcut-with-relative-path-in-windows/

– Sankalp Kotewar – 2019-03-09T06:29:10.427

Answers

The short answer is that there is no way to have a USB drive always get the same drive letter when attached to multiple systems.

To get the same drive letter you'd have to use a script to do this on insertion of the drive into the computer.

The problem is that Windows has disabled Autorun since late XP days.

The other problem is that you're assuming the computers will all have the save drive letter available.

The path to the solution is to recognize that your second paragraph is incorrect: It is NOT necessary for the USB drive to have the same drive letter each time it is mounted in order to access the contents programmatically.

There are ways to identify a drive and find the drive letter it is assigned and then reference it. Installers on any form of removable media have worked this way for decades.

You should look into relative paths, which allow shortcuts and files to refer to each other so long as they are only in the same position relative to each other, and where absolute paths may change.

You should also spend some time investigating whether there is a more effective way to store the files you are storing on this USB that meets your needs. While your question lacks a lot of information necessary to go deeper, there are other solutions out there which would have the same result but are designed for specific content types.

music2myear

Posted 2019-03-05T22:34:40.763

Reputation: 34 957