physical drive letters stepping on mapped drives. Why?

[cameramonkey]

Ok, I would LOVE to hear the official line from Microsoft, but I guess I'll settle for you guys.

Anyone know why after 16 years and (6 major versions), windows STILL cant tell that a drive has been mapped so that it doesnt re-use a drive letter for things like card readers?

Have I been missing something all these years? I am getting tired of having to manually configure a card reader in drive manager to not use F: because a network share is mapped to that letter.

anyone? (or has this been fixed in Vista and I havent run across it yet?)

 

[linney]

There is an old wives tale about using higher alphabetic letters for Mapped drives to stop this problem.

Needed: More Drive Letters

http://windowssecrets.com/L040607-03-Needed-More-Drive-Letters

I need more mapped drives!!
thread779-1188579

 

[SimonDavies]

local drives are usually issued the beginning letters in the alphabet, so if you have used upto E and add an additional local drive it will automatically use F as it's next letter even if that's allocated as a network drive.

I normally start my network letters further down the alphabet (H for Home drive is normally my first mapped drive actually).

Simon

The real world is not about exam scores, it's about ability.

 

[Sympology]

I believe it is because physical drives are mapped before network drives. Also i belive physical drives take presidence over virtual drives.

This may not be fact, but it's what I've observered since manual mapping of drives since DOS 3.22

Only the truly stupid believe they know everything.
Stu.. 2004

 

[cameramonkey]

Yes, you can map network drives at the bottom and work your way up. Thats what I do now.

I just ran into a customer that thier old IT guy didnt do that, and now whenever they plug in one of those card readers with 4 slots it steps on thier F: drive.

I cant easily fix it, as they have several software packages hard coded to run from F: that are a major pain to reinstall.

and its not a "physical drives first and mapped drives second" issue. this also happens when you plug in a device days after a boot. Seems logical that the system would say "hey, I see something here on F already, I'll skip it.

Seems stupid that M$ hasnt figured out how to make it work yet. We shouldnt have to map from the bottom up just to avoid thier automation glitch.


Its like the issue I had on an NVIDIA chipset mobo running vista last month. If you boot the system with a thumb drive inserted, it would BSOD during boot. Remove the device and it was fine (and would function normally if you inserted after it was up). The proper action in that case isnt "well you just have to make sure there are no USB drives when you boot" its fix the damn drivers. (I gave up and rolled them back to XP since there was no fix).