Can I create shortcuts to an external HD which moves from machine to machine?

[Cyril N. Alberga]

I asked this question on the "newuser" group with no relevant response.
I am re-posting it here, either for some help or for a suggestion as
to where would be the most appropriate place to ask.

CNA

I have several external hard drives which I use on more than one system.
They do not get assigned to the same drive letters from one time to
the next. I wish to use shortcuts to refer to some of the files on
these drives, and it was suggested that I use environment variables,
e.g. %PictureDrive%:\2006 Marqueses\At Sea\South Seas Party 01.jpg

I have created (by hand) shortcuts to files on the disks, set the
environment variable, and hand-modified the shortcut, replacing the
drive letter by %PictureDrive%.

Is there any way to create such shortcuts without the hand massaging?

Is there any way to have the appropriate environment variable set (and
if need-be, created) when I plug my external hard-drive into Aunt
Tilly's PC when I visit and wish to bore her with some pictures?

Thanks for any suggestions

Cyril N. Alberga

PS as an alternative, is it possible to address a device by its volume
name, such as (in this case) "PICTURES"?

[q_q_an...@yahoo.co.uk]

* not exactly what you want but use \ instead of e:\ in your
shortcuts
and have the shortcuts stored on a folder on the e drive. (the ext
drive where the pics are)
whatever letter the external drive is assigned. (e,r,f etc ) the
shortcuts link to the pics
this is true for whatever comp the drive is plugged in.

actually, that may not even work. shortcutss may not work with just a
\blah they may just change to absolute for the comp it's created on.

* You may be able to give your ext drive a strange leter(late in the
alphabet), like N, and it'll be N on any comp. You may be able to do
that in a batch file so click and it's done.

* reagrding refrring to drive by colume. All I can find are
programming stuff on it. No use.

http://www.updatestage.com/xtras/doc/general/pathtocd.html
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/director/tips/cd/multi-volume.html

.

[Cyril N. Alberga]

q_q_an...@yahoo.co.uk wrote:

Thank you for your suggestions. I'll give them a try. I (abortivly)
tried to set the address in a shortcut to something beginning with ..
but quickly found that THAT was forbidden.

I'll check out your links when I get back to my computer, later.

Again, thanks,

Cyril

[q_q_an...@yahoo.co.uk]

I don't think those links are much use. The first one is for Lingo (a
scripting language for Director) . The second one is I think for BASIC.
And they won't help for shortcuts. I was just pointing out that that
method of identifying the drive by volume, is no use.

There's still the solution of using a letter late in the alphabet like
N.

A solution that might work but is ugly , is
creating shortcuts , in a batch file,
http://www.xxcopy.com/xxcopy38.htm

They give an example of
xxmklink "c:\Program Files\mydir\My Shortcut.lnk" c:\boot.ini

so maybe you could do something along the lines of xxmklink *.*

There are other program sfor creating shortcuts
http://www.optimumx.com/download/#Shortcut Shortcut v1.11

and shortcut.exe is apparently part of the win xp res kit (I don't
know whether that and Shortcut v1.11 are the same).

-
I think generally, your prob is how to create shortcuts on a drive, to
the same drive, whatever the drive letter is.

I'd be suprised if it's not posible. But at worst, you could do it from
the command line with a program. i.e. then run the batch file to
recreate all the shortcuts, to the correct drive.

What was wrong with using environment variables in shortcuts? howcome
you have to keep modifying the shortcuts manually?

I think your best bet is the N drive. or Q drive or whatever. If it's
easy to change a drive letter. And i'm sure there's even an easy way to
do it with a single click of a batch file to run a comman to do it

[Cyril N. Alberga]

This is a case where I wish to have a number of directories which share
files, but not the same set in each directory, so you might have:

A/a.x
A/b.x
A/c.x
A/d.x
B/a.x
B/c.x
B/e.x
C/b.x
C/d.x
C/e.x

Where the files a.x are identical in each of the directories where they
occur.

When you have several hundred such files one of two problems arises:

1) you quickly fill up your diskdrive
2) you have hundreds (or thousands) of shortcuts to individually change
from X:\... to %foobar%:\...

So, as usual you buy space with time.

I would probably have to use drive letter W: or X:, given the vagaries
of memory card readers, scanners, etc. Further, (to show my utter
ignorance of these things) I have no idea how to force the drive letter
on a USB external HD.

Puzzled, Cyril

[Sharon Franks]

You answered your own question. Manually change the drive letter that way it
will always have the same letter, nothing else will use it. In Windows XP,
right-click My Computer and then click Manage. In the left pane under
Computer Management click Disk Management and you will see a list of all
drives in the right pane. Right-click the drive or device whose letter you
want to change and click "Assign the following drive letter". Assign the
drive letter and click OK.

--

Sharon Franks
MCC group
Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (MCSD)
Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT).

"Cyril N. Alberga" <calb...@bellatlantic.net> wrote in message
news:%23Cc4Nvr...@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl...

[Uwe Sieber]

Cyril N. Alberga wrote:

> I have several external hard drives which I use on more than one system.
> They do not get assigned to the same drive letters from one time to the
> next. I wish to use shortcuts to refer to some of the files on these
> drives
>

> Is there any way to create such shortcuts without the hand massaging?
>

Getting the same drive letter for several external drive on serval
computers requires a 3rd party software. I'm a 3rd party :-)

Using my USB drive letter manager (USBDLM)it's no problem to
get the same letter for all external drives on all machines.
The software must be installed on all machines and of course
there must be one letter that is availlable on all machines...

There are many ways to configure USBDLM. The most simple one
in your case is to install the USBDLM service on all machines
and put an USBDLM.INI on all your external drives. The file
contains the prefered drive letter like this:

[DriveLetters]
Letter1=B

When a new external drive (USB or Firewire) is detected then
the USBDLM service tries to read an USBDLM.INI from this drive
and then it remounts it to the configured letter if its availlable.

If there is no drive letter that is availlable on all machines
then you can let remount the drives into empty NTFS folders like
C:\MyBackupDrives

http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbdlm_e.html

Greetings from Germany

Uwe