USB Drive Letter tool

Novell Cool Solutions: Cool Tool

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In Brief

Change the drive letter for USB sticks.

Vitals

Updated:	28 Feb 2006
File Size:	157KB
License:	Free
Download:	/coolsolutions/tools/downloads/usbletter.zip
Publisher:	Marcel de Roode

Disclaimer

Please read the note from our friends in legal before using this file.

Details

Note: This tool now supports multiple languages (English, Spanish, Dutch and German), and multiple USB devices on one computer. Drive letter B: is now supported.

"Getting USB Devices to work under Windows XP" USB devices can give some problems in combination with NetWare mappings. Our restricted users cannot use diskmanager to change drive letters. Therefore, I created a small tool so restricted users can change the drive letter of their USB device.

Run this tool in a ZENworks application, as unsecure system user. The default drive letter suggested is U:, but when USBLetter is started with a commandline parameter another default drive letter can be chosen (E: - Z: or E - Z).

This application requires c:\temp to exist.

Comments:

The program worked, but then hung on the 3rd or 4th run and every time after. I would really like to see this with pure command line and no GUI.
Correct, this seems to be inherent to the Windows XP diskpart program that I use, which hangs after 3 or 4 times trying to change a drive letter. This also happens if you use diskpart in a "dos-box" for a few times in a row to assign a drive letter.

Nice util but can't get it to work for restricted users, Get error message "No Removable Drives Found" When using the batch file the "disk management services could not complete the operation" Works great if the user has local admin rights. Any fix to this would be great... thanks
Correct This is inherent to being a restricted user. Drive letters of removable devices are global to all users of a computer, so only administrators are allowed to change them. (This is of course also true when using Diskpart.exe or the Disk Management GUI).
A possible solution to this problem is to use ZENworks to deliver the application, running as unsecure system user. When ZENworks is not available, use the CPAU tool
(http://www.joeware.net/win/free/tools/cpau.htm)(http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/tools/14460.html)
to run the tool as a user with administrative rights.

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Reader Comments

• Nice util. The German XP-Version diskpart show "Wechselmed" not "Removeable".
• This works good with usb flash drives but ignores my iomega USB removable hard drive. Can this please be fixed???
• Doesn't work.