Windows 10 renaming drives and confusing Sony Vegas

[Aaron Star]

With windows drive lettering is pretty closely tied to the port its plugged into. If you move portable media around to different USB ports, then windows assumes its a different drive.

With CD or external HDD media that you really do not want have the drive letter changed, set the drive to x,y,z. I move all DVD drives to Z 1st thing on a new configuration. Hard disks will always be seen 1st and given asending lettering. If you leave portable drives in while rebooting, these are treated like Hard disks on the system and lettered accordingly. Place electrical tape over USB ports you do not need is a good way of making sure you use the same USB port every time for portable media. This should curb your bouncing drive letters.

If you go into your device manager, and choose show hidden devices, you will see under HHD all the instances of drives that are not active on the system. removing the inactive drives will reset your drive lettering for portables. Then the next time a device is inserted it will build a new profile for it with letter.

[Paul Gregory]

Am I correct in assuming that you used ‘Device Manager’ to change drive letters? Should I be able to assign my CD & Blu-ray burners as Y & Z first?

Thanks in advance

[Aaron Star]

Yes. You are correct.

[Nigel O’neill]

Personally, I would rename my external data drives further down the alphabet. I use P for Projects, O for output and R for Removable (my disc caddy). If you are using USB drives, simply disconnect at the drive rather than unplugging from the socket as suggested later on, because Windoze assumes a drive plugged into a different USB is a new one and gives it a new drive letter.

I also use RAID technology behind these drives, so whilst P and O appear to be 1 disk each, they are in fact 4: RAID 1 (mirror) for P so that I have a backup copy in real time and RAID 0 (striping) for drive O because I want performance (but with no redundancy).

I use C for my main drive, and D, E, F and G for disc burners.

Corporate networks also recognise this need and start their network drive mapping from H for Home and then go down the alphabet.

My system specs: Intel i7 970, GTX570, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 12 (x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6