How do I force an application to recognise two names for a disk drive?

Question

I have an extensive image database (3.25GB metadata, 90K images) held in a legacy product (idImager V5). This in turn utilises SQL Server 2005 as the underlying DBMS.

Over time, I have been adding and maintaining image information and have shifted the database to different disc drives to utilise larger discs, or to replace defective drives. I have had different locations for the database, and different locations for the images that are being managed. Disk names have changed over the period of use. All references to drives relate both to physical and logical drives. I have never had any partitioning of the drives nor multiple boot systems.

The current situation is that the database is on drive C: named "Windows7_OS". This name has never changed over the years. The images are on drive D: named "2nd System Drive". This drive has been named "New Volume" in the past.

I have some pictures stored in the database when the name was "New Volume", and some when the name was "2nd System Drive". If I try to access photos stored under the current wrong name, I get the error message

.

If I switch the names I get the identical message (including a full path name) but relative to the other name.

Is there any way to get the image database to accept both names? My initial thought was to alias the drive - in Windows or SQL Server. I have not found a way to do this. I do not wish to work through the full metadata and image databases in order to sort out the incorrect names, nor do I wish to setup the system from scratch.

Update:

@Scott's suggestion only works when a drive on one computer is changed to one on another computer. It does not work where the same drive is captured in the database twice under different labels, but only one label is visible to the database at a time. Checking this apporach revealed that configuring the Catalog Explorer to exclude the Catalog Folders also removes this option from sight.

Update:

It has proved necessary to follow @harrymc's suggestion, in spirit though not detail. A table in the database has all the file paths containing images, and the media label for each file path. Changing the data in this table provides an exact solution to my problem. This required backing up the database, and operating with database owner privileges.

Answer 1

If SQL Server 2005 checks the volume label, there is no way to hide the fact that the label has changed, so you need to change the way that the pictures are stored in the database.

The only way I can think of to change "New Volume" to "2nd System Drive" in the database, is to reimport the pictures, in the spirit of the following :

1. Change the volume name to "New Volume"
2. Run a query that selects all database pictures on "New Volume"
3. Save the query result on a file
4. Delete the pictures on "New Volume" from the database
5. Change the volume name to "2nd System Drive"
6. Import the saved pictures

As I don't have SQL Server 2005 to play with nor a copy of your database, I cannot go more into details. I suggest taking full backups of the database before starting.

Answer 2

Rather than aliasing the drive, you might try using a powershell command to alias, rename, or move all the files. I would suggest moving or renaming over aliasing.

For renaming the files the cmdlet is Rename-Item or ren

Rename-Item *.html *.txt     'This renames all files ending with .html to end with .txt

For moving the files the cmdlet is Move-Item or mv

Move-Item c:\images\* d:\images\     'Moves all files from the c:\images\ directory to d:\images\

I am not sure if the renaming would work but moving should.

Answer 3

I think your problem is completely IdImager related. It's catalogs must be storing the volume label and you need to update them, which shouldn't be a difficult process using IdImager.

From: http://forum.idimager.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=14164

Go to Catalog Folders, select the top level folder (that can be the drive ID), right click and select 'Relocate Catalog Folder'. Enter the new location (in your case that's the same as the old location) and click OK.

IIRC this should only take a few seconds or so...`