Drives keep changing letters

I have several internal and external drives on my laptop which I have assigned different letters to each of them but I noticed yesterday whenever I plug them into the laptop the letters are changing automatically on the external drives, the drive called Acronis was assigned F now its H for example, how can i stop this from happening?

This can happen if, for example, you connected the Nikon & Photo drive disks before the Acronis one.
When Windows boots, it's first-come-first-served for drive letters.
If you had connected the Acronis disk yet none of the others, Acronis should be assigned F:\. And then the others would have been G, H if you'd connected them later on.

I hardly ever bother with assigning specific letters to external drives now but, when I used to, I used letters M onwards because they were unlikely to get used up by other devices.
e.g.
If you had assigned M to Acronis, Nikon & Photo drive disks would be F, G as now yet Acronis would still be M.

Denis

Sorry, I've been fiddling with my reply.
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Denis

Try3 said:

Sorry, I've been fiddling with my reply.
You'll need to refresh the webpage to see the changed version.


Denis

Click to expand...

Thanks, in that case i will need to change the drive which i have labled Acronis a different higher letter as Acronis will look for a pacific letter when its updating the rescue media builder, same with the drive labled photo drive back up as Goodsync looks for the same letter drive when its being updated.

Bikeit said:

Acronis will look for a pacific letter when its updating the rescue media builder

Click to expand...

I didn't know Acronis could be set to look for specific drive letters.
I never update the boot 'disk' anyway.
[I only have the sawn-off, free version from Seagate.]

For procedures run by my batch scripts in Windows 10-11, I write the scripts to search for the drive label [e.g. Acronis] then retrieve that to use as the target for backing up / whatever. But that's no use for running Acronis / Goodsync etc.
Identifydrives.bat [post #36] - TenForums


Best of luck,
Denis

Your drive letters will remain persistent if you assign letters high in the alphabet. For example, I have one nvme external drive I use for storage that stays connected all the time. It is partitioned into 2 partitions. I assigned it S and T. I have 4 other external nvme drives I plug in randomly that I use for images and other special purposes.. I have assigned them, , U, V, W and X. I mapped my Google Drive to Z. I don't use flash drives much anymore but when I do one will assign a low letter when it's plugged in.