Lazycoder

I love USB Flash drives

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Originally uploaded by SKoon.

I think I’m addicted to USB flash drives. I’ve got 6 altogether that have various portable apps and files on them. One drive holds the source code to a Javascript library I’m working on. Another has some SNES roms and an emulator on it along with portable versions of Thunderbird, Firefox, and OpenOffice.

So here’s my problem. When I plug a USB drive into my Windows XP Pro box at work, it’s recognized. It then gets assigned drive letter “E:” , that’s the next letter in my physical drive chain (HD = C:, CDROM= D:). BUT, I already have E: mapped to a network drive. Which one wins? The network drive wins. So I have no way to access the flash drive. UNLESS, I go into the Disk Manager and manually set the drive letter to something else. Trying to keep track of all the drive letters of my mapped drives on various machines and making sure I don’t have any collisions is getting to be a little hard. Any USB gurus out there have any idea why Windows doesn’t query the current drive letters in use and assign the USB drive to one that is free?

(Obligatory dig at Microsoft for the day: I don’t have this problem on my Linux machines or iBook because of the simplicity that is the Unix file system. Really, do we need drive letters anymore? Is it still the 1980′s?)