Installing The High Rely Drive Manager

As I mentioned earlier, instead of using the 1.2 version of High Rely Drive Manager, I used an alpha copy of v2.0, which runs as a service. With HRDM v2.0 you have edit a file called HRDM2.ini so that the service can assign drive letters to the eSATA drives. The application then statically assigns drive letters to the drives making it easier to swap out drives during your backup rotations without Windows re-assigning a drive letter to a new disk. I tried following the samples in the manual, but as it turned out, the examples given produced more work than necessary. My initial file not only took care of the drive letter assignments, but it also created several shared directories on each hard disk that weren't needed. In this case, a simple template with remarks would be easier to work with rather the supplied empty INI file that needs to be edited from scratch. The contents of the HRDM2.ini file require just two items, the volume serial number assigned to each disk drive and the letter assigned to that volume.

My final HRDM2.ini file looks like this:

...that's it. You can get each drive's Volume Serial Number by going to the Windows Command Line and typing the directory command, DIR. The volume serial number is listed on the second line of output.

Once you've edited the file, you're ready to restart the HRDM2 service either from the command line, the Control Panel>Computer Management>Services interface or by clicking Restart HRDM2 under your Programs listing. Once the service is back up again, you can then confirm the mounted drives by checking the HRDM2 log file located in the C:\Program Files\Highly Reliable Systems directory:

Log file contents confirming a successful HRDM2 service startup.