USB Ports Letter Assignments

How do the Drive Letters get assigned for USB Ports?

I have an HP Pavilion 6730 computer. It has only 2 USB Ports. I use one for my Mouse. That leaves me only one free USB Port, which I always use for my Flash Drive.

Now … my Flash Drive has always shown up as Drive E:

Well, two days ago, I performed some Computer Maintenance. I reinstalled avast, Opera, Foxit Reader, IrfanView, MBAM and YouTube Downloader. I then did the CCleaner, Glary Utilities, JetClean thing as I always do after reinstalls. I then performed a Hard Drive Defrag with Puran Defrag.

Afterwards, the Desktop Shortcut for bringing up my PortableApps.com GUI did not want to work. I was fixing to redo the Shortcut when I noticed that now my Flash Drive was showing up as Drive F: After redoing the Shortcut to reflect the new Drive F: Designation of my Flash Drive, everything is of course Cool.

Why did the Drive Designation of my Flash Drive change from Drive E: to Drive F: when I’m still using the exact same USB Port location that I have always used before and that it always gave me a Drive E: Designation?

Maybe taking a look at Disk Management would help explain the assignment of F rather than E :

http://my.jetscreenshot.com/2701/m_20120916-j4s1-85kb.jpg

Remember that the auto assignment always picks the next available drive letter - unless you manually assign
or change it.

How do I bring up Drive Management?

I simply did a search for Disk Mnagement

Oh, I thought you were referring to something in the Control Panel or something like that.
Well, I’ll see if I can find anything because I certainly didn’t assign it to Drive F:

Bottom line, it works fine. I was just curious as to why it happened after all this time.
Thanks, Bob!

It is in the control panel. The search the Windows Search.

This should help get you to the right place:


http://my.jetscreenshot.com/2701/m_20120916-j9th-132kb.jpg

Do you happen to have any peripherals attached to the computer that might have a USB connection as that may well be being detected and assigned a drive letter.

If I have my Epson printer switched on, it has a multi card reader slot and that gets allocated a drive letter (see images), if I subsequently plug in a USB stick that gets the next one in order.

Nope, David. As I had previously mentioned, my computer has only 2 USB Ports.
One is always used by my Mouse.
And in the other one I always have my Flash Drive plugged in.

So, no other peripheral connected that wasn’t connected before.

In hindsight, the only thing that I can think MIGHT have somehow factored in this mysterious Flash Drive Designation change is:
After that computer maintenance that I had performed with the Apps Reinstalls … CCleaner, Glary Utilities & JetClean cleaning and the Defrag with Puran Defrag … I swapped out my usual 16 Gig Flash Drive with my new 8 Gig Flash Drive because that’s where I happened to have the avast Virus Definitions Update that I had downloaded at my sister’s house.

I don’t think I had ever used this 8 Gig Flash Drive on my computer.
Nevertheless, upon inserting it, it stated “New Hardware Found.” Then as expected, it worked fine after that.
I don’t know if for some reason, something happened during that swap between my 16 Gig Flash Drive to my 8 Gig Flash Drive.
They’re both the new Cruzer type Flash Drives. So I don’t know why that should have had anything to do with changing the Flash Drive Designation from E: to now F:

BTW … I did properly stop the functioning of my 16 Gig Flash Drive before removing it to insert my 8 Gig Flash Drive.

Mystery to me too then.

Thanks, David, Bob!
Bottom line, as long as the Flash Drives still function, that’s what counts.