Assigning USB drive to drive letter

[40oz]

I have a USB drive with all my Doom wads and stuff on it, and it includes batch files and shortcuts and whatever so that I have easy access to running Doom without opening too many folders. The batch files however, don't work sometimes because the letter of the removable drive changes sometimes, depending on which USB slot I use. I did a google search for a solution so that my particular USB drive stays the letter I assign to it, but it only works on my computer, and the letter changes when I use it on different PCs. Is there a way I can make the USB drive stay one specific letter at all times on all PCs?

[Never_Again]

There is no way, but you don't need that at all. Simply mass-edit the batch files on your USB drive to remove the drive letter from the paths, e.g.: "F:\WADS" -> "\WADS".

[qoncept]

Better yet, replace the "F:\WADS\poop.wad" with a relative path so you can copy stuff anywhere. ie, if your batch file is in the root of the drive, make it ".\WADS\poop.wad"

Then you can, say, copy it to the desktop on a buddy's computer and they'll still work.

[Kirby]

Wiilllldddcaaaarrrrdddd

Google sure is fun

[RestlessRodent]

Kirby said:

Wiilllldddcaaaarrrrdddd

Google sure is fun

He's on Windows, which is insanely crippled when it comes to UNIX conformance.

[Mr. T]

Symlinks?

Oh, you use Windows. Nvm lol!

[Planky]

Mr. T said:

Symlinks?

Oh, you use Windows. Nvm lol!

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/using-symlinks-in-windows-vista/

[RestlessRodent]

Planky said:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/using-symlinks-in-windows-vista/

If he's using FAT16/32 on his USB stick then he cannot use symlinks, junctions, etc. but if he were using NTFS on it he could.

[Maes]

GhostlyDeath said:

If he's using FAT16/32 on his USB stick then he cannot use symlinks, junctions, etc. but if he were using NTFS on it he could.

NTFS on a small USB flash drive is not such a hot idea -safe removal will be off by default on such drives, requiring manually changing this behavior the first time they will be plugged into a different compure, and it will sooner or later run into incompatibilities when plugged into one of the many devices that don't support NTFS. The FS overhead is also larger than FAT or exFAT. Makes data recovery in the event of a crash or FS corruption much harder, too.

As to wildcards/paths...had those on DOS and PC/M too :-p

[chungy]

I find it funny that you mention exFAT right after talking about NTFS compatibility. NTFS is way more compatible than that filesystem. (You are right about the overhead, but exFAT just was introduced way too late in the game to really be of tremendous use.)

[Maes]

Fair point, but at least exFAT was designed to be a portable filesystem. But NTFS...you'd might just as well use ext3. And yeah, I know it's marginally more supported than exFAT.

BTW, any non-windows device that will be able to read NTFS will probably be linux/unix based, so ext2/ext3 support usually comes in with the rest of the baggage. Low end MP3 players and the such will only be able to read FAT/FAT32 though.

[chungy]

Low-end MP3 players and the such are exactly the target exFAT was aiming for. I actually agree with the goal (though the insane patents around it are another issue...); simple filesystem with nearly no metadata. Nobody cares about user ownership or permissions on a MP3 player or phone's filesystem -- and that's the baggage ext3/4 or NTFS carry. At the same time, FAT32 is rather limiting with modern storage capacities (even the 4GiB filesize limit is easily reached as soon as someone wants to store a DVD ISO or 1080p movie or such on it). exFAT is based on FAT32 but with much better expanded limits (16EiB file size limit, for example); oh and UTC-based timestamps should be mandatory for any modern OS ;)

Maybe over time exFAT will penetrate the low-end MP3 market, as FAT32-only capable devices fade out of use, but I have doubts considering how patent-encumbered Microsoft made the filesystem. It has effectively locked out of Linux ever coming with exFAT support built-in (there are utilties and a FUSE driver already, though), not to mention masses of manufacturers that won't be willing to pay the MS tax for it. It's not even something that can be bypassed with small tweaks (the patents for FAT12/16/32 long-filenames turned out to be concerned about DOS backwards compatibility, so Linux repaired that by only generating short filenames that are invalid on DOS (but Windows still uses the long names just fine)).

As far as "NTFS...you'd might just as well use ext3" -- if staying in the Linux world only, would be a fair assesment, but if you need interoperability with Windows and large files, NTFS is almost the only way to go. Software sucks.

[neubejiita]

Why can you not use the equivalent of the Linux UUID system on Windows. Get a unique partition ID for the thumb drive and use that every time? That would be useful.

[CODOR]

neubejiita said:
Why can you not use the equivalent of the Linux UUID system on Windows. Get a unique partition ID for the thumb drive and use that every time?

I think this is how it works now. Windows recognizes the serial number and/or volume label of the FAT filesystem and tries to assign it the same drive letter it did last time.

The problem is on other people's computers you can't force it to use a particular drive letter without going through the administration panel (and might not be possible if the user doesn't have admin rights or the drive letter is already taken by something important)...

Maes said:
But NTFS...you'd might just as well use ext3.

There's ext2/3 drivers for Windows. It's been a while since I've used one but I remember they worked, but were a little slow and lacked features. So pretty much on par with NTFS on Linux :-)

[Nomad]

CODOR said:

(...or the drive letter is already taken by something important)

Yeah, that's the key right there. Trying to force a removable drive to use a specific drive letter is bound to cause a conflict somewhere.

[chungy]

CODOR said:

There's ext2/3 drivers for Windows. It's been a while since I've used one but I remember they worked, but were a little slow and lacked features. So pretty much on par with NTFS on Linux :-)

NTFS-3G is actually fairly complete with ownership, permissions, ACLs, compression, encryption, alternative data streams, namespace support and all that stuff.