Drive letter ghosting?

[TunaSoda]

Ok, I have a USB drive & a firewire drive

I assigned the USB drive letter V:
I assigned the Firewire drive letter M:

When I plug in the USB drive for the first time (since system boot) it shows up as drive V: like a good little drive, if I then unplug it, wait a few seconds (or even 15mins) when I plug it back in it then uses the next drive letter in line, not V: (some programs even still show it as V:, but not drive management or win explorer)

Same thing with the Firewire drive, I turn it on for the first time = M:, second time = N:, then O:

This seems like a recent issue as it used to just refresh to the same drive letter over and over as it should

Upon system restart, the drives mantian the last drive letter used!

Any ideas :?:

 

[TunaSoda]

No ideas?

 

[kitchenshark]

Been looking around on Google, but no luck. It could be a thing where windows just can't remember it's supposed to keep the same drive letter.

I've never been able to successfully keep the same drive letter on my removable drives up to this point. Although it isn't terribly important to me to be honest.

Crud, I'm at work so can't play around with the computer's settings here, was wanting to see if there was any kind of option to lock the drive letter to a certain device.

 

[sailer]

I've seen this once before and when I asked for it, I got the following explaination. When a drive is plugged in, it gets a letter designation. If you unplug a drive, the computer doesn't recognize that it was unplugged, but only that the drive is inactive. If you then plug the drive back in, it is assigned the next letter in order, because the former letter has already been activated in the registry. With plug in drives, the registry resets itself every time the computer is turned off, so the plug in drive will go back to its original letter the next time the computer is turned on.

Ok, this is the way it was explained to me, so it might not be accurate. It does make a small amount of sense though.