Retaining of drive letters.

Andy

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Aug 25, 2006, 8:13:02 AM8/25/06

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I have recently installed a USB disk and want to refer to it as E: which is
currently used by my CD drive. I have gone into disk manager and changed the
drive letters so that my CD is now on F: leaving E: free and changed the new
disc to E:
All is now ok, my computer sees it as E: However, as soon as I reboot the
PC, the drives revert back to their original state i.e. CD= E: USB = F: I can
change these around fine and all is OK once again until reboot.
How can I make these changes permenant and not have to change them each time
I boot the PC.
Regards
Andy

Yves Leclerc

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Aug 25, 2006, 9:51:03 AM8/25/06

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Depending on what type of XP user account you are using, if the account is not
an "administrator" type account, the changes do not seem to be saved
permanently. I would try assigning the drive letter with the Administrator
account.

--
---

Y.

Andy

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Aug 25, 2006, 2:48:01 PM8/25/06

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I do use an administrator account. I even tried starting in safe mode and
logging in as administrator but the changes were still not saved. For some
reason my CD-RW drive insists on being E:

Uwe Sieber

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Aug 25, 2006, 5:21:08 PM8/25/06

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I've seen a report that ZoneAlarm caused such a problem.

Andy

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Aug 25, 2006, 8:41:01 PM8/25/06

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I do have Zonealram running so I will see what heppens if I close that and
then change the drive.

Thnaks

Andy

Chuck

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Aug 27, 2006, 12:41:17 PM8/27/06

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I've used ZoneAlarm for several years and always used "update" to
upgrade to the latest version. With the most recent release
zlsSetup_65_731_000, it reset my CD and DVD drive letters on the
secondary IDE bus. The drive on the primary IDE bus was not affected.
Changing the drive letters back using the Windows Disk Management tool
worked until the next reboot, but then they were changed again. I
typically keep letter my optical drives so they have letters at the end
of the alphabet. After the reboot, the drives would move to the next
available drive letters after the hard drives.

I've done several tests and verified that ZoneAlarm is responsible for
the behaviour. I'm anxious for a solution if anyone knows of one.

Uwe Sieber

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Aug 28, 2006, 1:55:13 AM8/28/06

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Chuck wrote:
> I've used ZoneAlarm for several years and always used "update" to
> upgrade to the latest version. With the most recent release
> zlsSetup_65_731_000, it reset my CD and DVD drive letters on the
> secondary IDE bus. The drive on the primary IDE bus was not affected.
> Changing the drive letters back using the Windows Disk Management tool
> worked until the next reboot, but then they were changed again. I
> typically keep letter my optical drives so they have letters at the end
> of the alphabet. After the reboot, the drives would move to the next
> available drive letters after the hard drives.
>
> I've done several tests and verified that ZoneAlarm is responsible for
> the behaviour. I'm anxious for a solution if anyone knows of one.

Thanks for the information. I have a ugly workaround until
they fix it:
http://www.uwe-sieber.de/files/remount.zip

It's a commandline tool that quickly changes drive letters.
Sample:

remount e: x:

Greetings from Germany

Uwe

Fred S *****

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Aug 28, 2006, 7:47:58 PM8/28/06

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Chuck,

I also have experienced this problem on my WinXP Home system. My CD-Rom
was set as "Q" and my Zip drive was set as "G" - now, they've changed
back to "G" for the CD-Rom and "H" for the Zip drive. They worked fine
for quite a while (over two to three years that way). I don't know when
the "change" occurred, however, but I guess it could be due to ZA.

I was using ZA 6.5.722.000 and decided to go up to 731 - the problem
continues with both of these versions.

I plan to do some testing myself with older versions of ZA but would
like to know what you've done so far. You mentioned that you performed
some tests and it would help if only to not reinvent the wheel, so to speak.

One more thing, I posted info from your post to the "General" group on
the ZA forums - hoping from some help over there.

Thanks, Fred

Fred S *****

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Aug 30, 2006, 10:47:31 PM8/30/06

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This is an update to this post and topic:

I was able to remove Zone Alarm's latest version and reinstalled an
older version (ver 6.1.744.001).

As a result, the drive letters now remain as set using Disk Management.

FredS

Chuck

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Aug 31, 2006, 5:09:54 PM8/31/06

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I agree it is ugly but maybe the only thing to do is just script this
file to set things back up with each login. Thanks for the tip.
Unfortunately I'm getting the famous 404 Not Found error when I go to
your link. I'll try searching for the utility.

My daughter is a 5th year German language student who is trying for an
exchange student program in Germany. I return the greetings.

Chuck

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Aug 31, 2006, 5:16:36 PM8/31/06

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I usually do pretty extensive testing before I post to a message group
so I was pretty confident that the problem was with ZA. The strange
thing is that when I uninstalled the version of ZA that caused the
drive renumbering and re-installed the version that I previously had
active, the drive numbering problem was still there!

Since I have a sys admin background, I make many backups prior to
trying new versions of software so I restored my backup and the problem
went away. I don't know if ZoneLabs will ever fix the problem or even
acknowledge that it is a problem. Until then, I may have to start
looking for alternatives. (Or use Uwe's workaround)

Fred S *****

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Aug 31, 2006, 6:59:57 PM8/31/06

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Chuck,

I also have numerous image files of my system and I restored my system
after having problems uninstalling ZA v6.5.722. I used a manual
uninstall procedure that I got from the ZA forum (where I posted this
problem). Nice folks there were aware of the dropped drive letters and
agreed with me to try an older version.

I did that as noted in my post (see below) and then RESET the drive
letters using Disk Management again - this time they held on, that is,
they no longer change at boot time and I'm back to where I want to be.

Once again the version that works is 6.1.744 -

I suggest you do the same if you want your drive letters back the way
they were.

Fred

Uwe Sieber

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Sep 1, 2006, 3:12:40 AM9/1/06

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Chuck wrote:
>>>
>>> I've done several tests and verified that ZoneAlarm is responsible for
>>> the behaviour. I'm anxious for a solution if anyone knows of one.
>> Thanks for the information. I have a ugly workaround until
>> they fix it:
>> http://www.uwe-sieber.de/files/remount.zip
>>
>

> I agree it is ugly but maybe the only thing to do is just script this
> file to set things back up with each login.

That's the plan :-)

> Unfortunately I'm getting the famous 404 Not Found error when I go to
> your link. I'll try searching for the utility.

My site has been down yesterday. Now it's online again.

> My daughter is a 5th year German language student who is trying for an
> exchange student program in Germany. I return the greetings.

:-)

Uwe