External Hard Drive Problems

dg647

I have an external hard drive that I use to store all of my music on. I am using Windows Media Player to play the music. The problem is that in Media Player I have this stored under the file path E:\Music\Artist\Album.

However lately my computer has been recognising my external hard drive as either F or G. Then when I go to play music Media Player says it cannot play the music as the file path is not valid/does not exist. Is there any way that I can get my computer to always recognise the external as the E drive, or does anybody have any other solutions? All advice is welcome and appreciated..

In case it helps it is a Freecom 400 GB Hard drive and I am using Windows XP

Zorba

dg647 wrote: »

I have an external hard drive that I use to store all of my music on. I am using Windows Media Player to play the music. The problem is that in Media Player I have this stored under the file path E:\Music\Artist\Album.

However lately my computer has been recognising my external hard drive as either F or G. Then when I go to play music Media Player says it cannot play the music as the file path is not valid/does not exist. Is there any way that I can get my computer to always recognise the external as the E drive, or does anybody have any other solutions? All advice is welcome and appreciated..

In case it helps it is a Freecom 400 GB Hard drive and I am using Windows XP

Yes my computer does that too sometimes, in my case i'm using iTunes, all i have to do is tell iTunes the music is in F or G or wherever then reboot the computer and it works fine, dunno why windows decides to move drives around though.

keen

dg647 wrote: »

I have an external hard drive that I use to store all of my music on. I am using Windows Media Player to play the music. The problem is that in Media Player I have this stored under the file path E:\Music\Artist\Album.

However lately my computer has been recognising my external hard drive as either F or G. Then when I go to play music Media Player says it cannot play the music as the file path is not valid/does not exist. Is there any way that I can get my computer to always recognise the external as the E drive, or does anybody have any other solutions? All advice is welcome and appreciated..

In case it helps it is a Freecom 400 GB Hard drive and I am using Windows XP

You can rename the drive to the correct letter if Windows assigns it a different one, right click my computer, manage, disk managment, right click the drive you want renaming, click change driver letter.

coolmoose

what they said ^^

reassign the drive letter to something like w: or y:, something that's not commonly used by other devices, you shouldn't have any problems then.

mathias

You can permanently assign a letter to a particular drive , if you want , do that and you should have no problems , that letter will never be used for random drive connections afterwards , only for the device you assign it too.

dg647

Ok thanks for that, much appreciated, thaks for the quick response. Will make things easier for me now. Just when I think I know something about computers something small like this comes along and teaches me a lesson..

Gadgetman496

mathias wrote: »

You can permanently assign a letter to a particular drive , if you want

Are you referring to setting up a "Mount Location" for a particular drive or is there a handier way?

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coolmoose

gadgetman496 wrote: »

Are you referring to setting up a "Mount Location" for a particular drive or is there a handier way?

-

Just using Disk Management utility you can automatically reassign a drive a new letter, this will stay with the drive.

Gadgetman496

coolmoose wrote: »

Just using Disk Management utility you can automatically reassign a drive a new letter, this will stay with the drive.

It may not (In fact will not always) if your drives are external & you have more then one.

coolmoose

i have multiple external usb drives, have them all assigned a drive letter, and unique drive label, and they always keep the letter.

Gadgetman496

Once assigned & once you don't unplug the USB cable for them, they will.

But if you remove one to connect to another PC & then put it back ?????

blorg

My experience is that yes, they do stick with the same letter if you assign it in disk management. Where you would have a potential problem is if you unplug one of your assigned disks and then plug in something that is not assigned- it will get the first available drive letter (even if you have this assigned to one of your disconnected disks.) E.g. you need to assign all your disks to be sure of them all getting the right letter when re-attached in an arbitrary order.

A particularly nasty one is if you have a network drive mounted immediately after your fixed disks, when you plug in a USB device it will try to map it to the same drive letter, and simply not appear at all with no error message. (Again, you can manually fix this in drive management but an average user can not be expected to know this.)

coolmoose

gadgetman496 wrote: »

Once assigned & once you don't unplug the USB cable for them, they will.

But if you remove one to connect to another PC & then put it back ?????

even with unplugging, never have problems once unique labels assigned. then again, i don;t plug in unassigned disks to this particualr computer, i could imagine that casing problems, but 3 external drives, constant pugging and unplugging, and no problems!

Soundman

gadgetman496 wrote: »

Once assigned & once you don't unplug the USB cable for them, they will.

But if you remove one to connect to another PC & then put it back ?????

Nope. I have two externals as well, both with drive letters that I have assigned them. I have plugged them in and out of several PC's and Macs with no trouble. Drive letter always stays to the one I have assigned.