At times you might want to ensure that, no matter how many drives you have attached to you computer, when you attach a specific one, it’ll always show up with the same driveletter. You might wish to do this for backup-purposes, or for automization purposes, or for whatever other reasons you might have.
To do this, you need to connect the drive, make sure it is found and readable by Windows. Then enter the start-menu, click “run” and enter the command «diskmgmt.msc» to open the Disk Management console, as shown above.
Locate the drive you wish to allocate a different driveletter for, and right-click it. In the menu, choose «Change Drive Letter and Paths». In the menu that subsequently pops up, re-choose the drive, and press change.
Drives are allocated driveletters from A-Z, A usually being reserved for a 3.5 or 5 ¼ inch floppy disk drive, C usually being reserved for your %SYSVOL%-drive, or SYStem VOLume, the drive which contains your Windows-folder.
If you wish to assign multiple disks, you should start from Z and work your way down the alphabet.
Assign the drive letter, and press OK. A dialog box will be shown, telling you that «Changing the drive letter of a volume might cause programs to no longer run. Are you sure you want to change this drive letter?»
IMPORTANT: If there are ANY programs at all that routinely run from or gets data from this drive, you might want to reconsider doing this in the first place, or at least make sure that you reassign these changes elsewhere as well, to ensure that your system continues to run.
If you still wish to change the drive letter, press «Yes» in the dialog box. If you do not wish to do so, press «No» (pretty logical eh?).
If you press «Yes» both the dialog box where you assign the new drive letter, and the warning one will disappear. If you press «No», you are returned to the dialog box where you assign the new drive letter.
Blog
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Changing drive letter
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Uncovering Model-specific errors
Most models of computer have one or two errors that you classically begin to see within about a year of their release. Be it motherboard issues, harddrive failures or simply keyboard malfunction, they all have them. The problem is that for each new model, there’s a new standard error. Some are shared across a range of similar models, whereas some are specific to a batch of computers.
These errors are something that you learn to live with; you learn to roll with the punches as it were, and to diagnose them. The problem here, is of course that what you see (the symptoms) isn’t always what you’ve got.
An example of this is HP’s nc6220 series computers, that presents itself with a Non-System Disk or Disk Error, leading users and supporters alike to assume that the harddrive is dead. Of course, this is partly because a previous model, the nc6000, had a large batch of bad drives that would kick the bucket after about a year or so.
With the nc6220, the error is not, however, in the harddrive, but on the motherboard, more specifically located in the harddrive controller. Other symptoms include slow boot, slow or no access to BIOS and inability to boot from a CD. The ultimate test is, of course, to put the harddrive into a different computer, and test it. If it boots, you know.
With IBM and Lenovo’s T4x-range of computers, the classic problem is a different one, but none the less annoying. Here, too, the motherboard calls it a day (or life if you will), but the symptoms are no output to both the on-board and any external monitors that might be connected.
Personally, I prefer motherboard failures, because, although annoying and time-consuming, the user does not end up losing data, which they would with a harddrive failure. -
Branding Internet Explorer
Like me, you’ve probably been using the internet for a while, and may have noticed that sometimes Internet Explorer has a “provided by”-tag, looking something like this:
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Safari for Windows – first impressions
I like trying out new pieces of software, and when Apple released Safari for Windows I had no choice but to try it out. First impression is that it is most definitely an Apple product, and bears great resemblance to e.g. iTunes. It is a sleek piece of software, and it seems to be sturdy enough.
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Firefox 2.0.0.13 crashes, unable to add extensions part two – the solution
My problems have, as I mentioned, been twofold; first there is the universal problem of not being able to add extensions, and second there is the problem of Firefox crashing on one of my machines.
The error data for the crashes look like this:
AppName: firefox.exe
AppVer: 1.8.20080.31114
ModName: firefox.exe
ModVer: 1.8.20080.31114
Offset: 0019e219
I decided to do a fresh reinstall of Firefox, but wanting to keep my profile, with all my bookmarks etc., I exported the profile folder (as detailed in the Mozilla Knowledgebase). I then uninstalled Firefox, and then reinstalled Firefox. I then imported the profile folder, and I am now able to install extensions, though the problems with the crashes remain. This seems to be caused by the profile, and I created a new profile accordingly.
To create a new profile, I ran the command “firefox.exe -ProfileManager”, and created a new profile. I copied files as detailed in the Mozilla Knowledge base article on recovering data from an old profile, and restarted firefox with the new profile, taking care to delete the old one. Some data was lost, but most of my preferences survived.
The install of Firefox was an updated and patched one, originally installed as 2.0.0.5 or something like that. Most likely problem was caused by my install of Firefox having been updated and patched instead of reinstalled.
To resolve this problem, I relied heavily on the following Mozilla Firefox Knowledgebase articles: (more…) -
Firefox 2.0.0.13 crashes, unable to add extensions part one – the problem
I’ve been using Firefox for a few years now, and love it dearly. After the update to version 2.0.0.13, I have experienced the following problems with it:
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Firefox extensions
It’s time to actually post a technical blog-post to my blog, so here goes…
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What will I blog about?
Having decided to blog about technical issues, here’s a (not in any way comprehensive) list of the topics I’ll be covering:
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Another explanation
I recently started using Twitter, and I actually quite like it. -
Blogs explained
CommonCraft have made this amazing video about what blogs are all about.
