Re: Conflict between Subst'd drive and USB storage devices
- From: "cquirke (MVP Windows shell/user)" <cquirkenews@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 07 Aug 2005 14:08:40 +0200
On Fri, 5 Aug 2005 07:59:03 -0700, "Paul B." <bogus@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>For convenience, I use subst to map the G: drive letter to a subdirectory
>under which I store all of my project folders. This caused no problems under
>Win2000, but I was recently migrated to XP.
>Now, if I insert a flash drive or hook up an external DVD-ROM drive, XP
>assigns the drive letter that subst is using to the external device. At
>first I couldn't figure out what was going on; the subst'd directory still
>showed up and the external device simply seemed not to be there. But I
>noticed the conflict in the hardware manager, and deleting subst mapping
>caused the external drive to appear.
>I assume that XP simply is not seeing the subst mapping, and uses G: because
>it thinks it is the lowest available drive letter. Is this a bug in XP?
Yep. Same thing happens with LAN shares, so the policy is to keep
both LAN share and Subst letter mappings to "high" letters.
>The only work-around I can come up with right now is to map subst to a
>higher drive letter, leaving G: availabe for the external devices. I haven't
>tried this yet, but it would probably work.
It does work. The other thing is to map the device to a higher letter
via Admin Tools, Storage etc. but as there's one constant Subst,
and an unbounded number of potential new drives and devices, I'd
treat the low letters as the immovable object and move the mappings.
>Any other suggested work-arounds? Is Microsoft aware of / working on a fix
>for this?
I've no idea on the state of clue where drive letter assignment is
concerned, but it's always been an ugly issue. MS-DOS and Win9x were
ugly but different; they'd avoid overlaying one thing over another,
but were far more rigid in allocating letters in the set order that
was based on when the entities were discovered - you could change the
letter for LAN shares, Substs and optical drives, but that was it; any
and all HD volume assignments were cast in stone.
There are safety/security risks associated with enumeration rather
than true identification, in that different things may ennumerate to
the same letter and thus inherit inappropriate settings.
For example, I reviewed a Win9x-era fingerprint reader, and the
associated "private spaces" encrypted-container-file-as-"drive"
software that went with it. Local legal customs forbade testing with
freshly-amputated fingers, but one risk I did pick up was that if I
created a "private space" as G: and shared G: on the LAN, then if your
"private space" also mapped to G:, I could read it through the share.
>------------ ----- ---- --- -- - - - -
The most accurate diagnostic instrument
in medicine is the Retrospectoscope
>------------ ----- ---- --- -- - - - -
.
- References:
- Conflict between Subst'd drive and USB storage devices
- From: Paul B.
- Conflict between Subst'd drive and USB storage devices
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