Windows 10 renaming drives and confusing Sony Vegas

[Mark Barton]

I don’t have Windows 10, but it probably works the same. You need to find the Disk Management tool. You can find it if you go to Control Panel and search for “Disk Manage”. You can also get there if you can Right Click on My Computer and choose Manage. Once you get to that tool, you will see all the drives listed. Right click on one and assign it the specific drive letter you want to use. You could change it from the assigned letter to another unused letter.

[Cami Kidder]

Thanks for your reply.

I thought of that, but was concerned I’d make things worse. When I go to the Disk Management tool, it only lists the C and D drives, the rest are blank – no letter assigned, so I don’t know which one to change.

If I could figure that out somehow, do you really think this would permanent fix my problem?

Thanks

[Mark Barton]

Did you have the external drive plugged in at the time you ran Disk Management? I just did this on Windows 7 Pro. My Garmin watch was assigned to H. I used Disk Management to change it to W. I ejected the drive and plugged a flash drive into the same USB port and it was assigned drive H. I then ejected the Flash drive and plugged the Garmin watch back into the same USB port and now it came back as drive W.

[Cami Kidder]

I think I understand what you were saying better now.

I’m out of my depth here so just wanted to verify that I understand what you are suggesting.

I’m trying to add a screenshot of my Disk Management dialog box, but the upload keeps failing.

This is what I see:
The top section has a list under Volume there are two blank lines, then RECOVERY D twice Seagate Backup drive (F:) and Windows (C:).

The F drive is the one that Sony Vegas thinks is called H.

If I understand correctly, you are saying I can simply change the name of the Seagate Backup Drive from F: to H: and everything should link back up?

Thanks again

[Mark Barton]

Yes. Since you specified it here in Disk Management, it should always assign that particular drive to H. So if you plug a different drive into that USB port, it may get F.

[Paul Gregory]

My experience is even worse with USB & Windows 10 even after clean installs. I plug something into a USB port & it asks me what I would like to do with it next time but it NEVER remembers anytime or which sort of file is opened with what program.

If I go to Explorer now called “This PC” It sometimes takes a few minutes before a newly plugged in drive even causes the PC to make a sound & then more time for the drive to appear on the left hand side. On the right hand side of the screen where you would normally see the details about file type, size date etc nothing is displayed. I can’t even get the vertical dividers to appear that separate the columns.

The PC has had thorough diagnostic checks down by myself & at the shop & no problems are ever found. It’s not uncommon to plug in a drive like a WD passport for it to say that the drive has problems & must be scanned to apply fixes. Once it’s done it’s scan it reports that no problems were ever found.

Thanks in advance

[Mark Barton]

That is sounding more like a hardware issue despite the diagnostic test saying otherwise. Unfortunately to really troubleshoot, that would be near impossible via this forum. I would start unplugging components that were not necessary to boot, in an effort to find if just the bare bones system would work. If I had to go to a shop, I would find another shop with some people that could troubleshoot the scenario you described. You might find somebody with Knoppix (https://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html) to try a different OS with that hardware to see if it is a hardware problem of not. On systems where I have a DVD or CD drive I can boot from, Knoppix will give me a graphical Linux environment where you can see the drive icons when you plug in external drives. This is a handy test since it does not need to install anything on your computer, but runs a completely different operating systems to give you a good second opinion of the hardware. If the hardware seems to work, then they probably did not do a real clean install of Windows 10.

[Cami Kidder]

Yes I believe I did have the external connected while viewing Disk Mgmt. However I made a discovery that solved my problem. It seems the FIRST external I plug in is assigned F://, and the SECOND one is assigned H:// so as long as I plug something in before my current project drive, I’m good. Almost finished editing the project tonight. Yippee!

Thanks for your replies and caring enough to help me work through this issue.

Best,
Cami

[Mike Kujbida]

Check out the reply by Stephen Mann (2nd post) on the How to redirect pathways for file on a project thread. He offers an interesting solution to this dilemma 🙂

[Paul Gregory]

I have a couple of WD passport portable drives both USB2 & 3. My friend has the same. I also have a USB3 hub that supports 3 x USB3 & 4 x USB2 connections. I plugged this is & here is what happened.

If I plugged in 1 at a time & them removed it they were all called drive ‘H’.

If I plugged then in one at a time the first one was called ‘H’ & the others that follower up were assigned letters higher up the alphabet. One drive was labelled ‘Red’ because I gave it that label a few years back.

I have both a CD Burner & a Blu-Ray Burner which are labelled ‘D’ & ‘E’. In Windows 7 I had these called ‘Y’ & ‘Z’ because you then always knew what they were.

I plugged in a USB 3 card reader & Windows displayed 5 new drives,only 1 of which has data. I eventually plugged in more devices 1 at a time phone,tablets & TV remote & these seemed to work OK.

So as I said Windows 10 USB functions aren’t working properly. Not only is every drive being called ‘H’ it never remembers what to do when USB’s are plugged in & if I had also nominated what program to open it with it doesn’t ever recall.

Thanks in advance