Off-topic - Mounting multiple USB sticks on Win XP

Lloyd Kvam lkvam at venix.com
Tue Apr 8 17:08:43 EDT 2008


On Tue, 2008-04-08 at 16:18 -0400, Ben Scott wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 3:56 PM, Lloyd Kvam <python at venix.com> wrote:
> >  Control Panel/Admin Tools/Manage Computer/Storage/Drives
> 
>   BTW, invoking "DISKMGMT.MSC" from "Run" or the command prompt also works.

That's much better.
> 
> > It also appears to mark the drive letter on the device rather than configuring
> >  the system to start lettering from U.
> 
>   Windows stores drive letter assignments in the registry.  It has
> some method of getting a unique signature for each volume.  For NTFS,
> it just uses the GUID from the filesystem superblock (or whatever it's
> called in NTFS).  Not sure about FAT.  Volume serial number, maybe.

I bet his are FAT partitions straight from the manufacturer, so no GUID.

> 
> >  Is this normal Windows behavior?
> 
>   Define "normal".  It's pretty normal in the sense that Windows
> normally drives one batty with crap like this.  :)
> 
>   FWIW, I was NOT able to reproduce the behavior you describe on my
> Win XP Pro SP2 box here at work.  I manually adjusted the mappings for
> two USB sticks.  They retain their custom mappings, even if I
> re-insert them out-of-order, or at roughly the same time.
> 
>   How is the user mapping the other "drives"?  SUBST? 

I think so.
> (snipped)
> -- Ben

Thanks very much for actually running the experiment.  I use file system
labels on my USB sticks to keep them straight.  This works quite nicely
with Linux.  I did not try to label Steve's drives.  That might be
enough to keep them organized.

I really appreciate the time and effort you put into helping.
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-- 
Lloyd Kvam
Venix Corp.
1 Court Street, Suite 378
Lebanon, NH 03766-1358

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