Can you permanently lock a drive letter?

Windows XP and Windows 7:

Can you lock hard drive letter assignemnet so that adding any new drives does not take that already assigned letter? Sometimes when reimaging a brand new drive, it can take an already assigned letter upon reboot and mess things up.

I have not a clue how to do what you are asking, however here are some tips from some casual observations i've made over the years.


I have seen drive letters change around on removable media (cd/dvd drives/ card readers) but I've not seen it happen on a hard drive.

You can go in an manually assign a drive letter to a device (control panel > administrative tools > computer management > disk management). I assigned a drive the letter "V" over a year ago and the letter has never changed or been taken by something else. Of course I've never had to deal with re-imaging a drive. You may want to see if windows is listing the drive as "removeable media" in the drive properties, it may not consider it a permanent drive and thus not reserve the letter in the future.

a little more far fetched, perhaps the act of re-imaging the drive is changing it's letter somehow or windows is recognizing it as a different drive.

Easy enough to change letters. I use Z for my 16GB flash. Try using a letter way up the alphabet and windows won't touch it. Other than that assignment always goes alphabetical and that's that. Be nice if we could simply use a number instead.
I just plug things in in a specific order. My majicjack and 2 printers = 4 letters that I don't need to browse. I simply hide and restrict those letters with win 7 mgr. That way even if I unplug them, windows will not use those letters (explorer will not show them) and they work fine when plugged back in.

Hide and restrict how?

I use Yamicsoft's Windows 7 Manager v2.02. Not free but it's da bomb for 7. Best piece of tweaking software out there bar none. There may be other free ways to do so. I haven't actually looked.
http://www.yamicsoft.com/

You can hide letters by using freeware Tweak UI > My Computer > check/uncheck letters.

But if you hook up a hard drive and image it, it will take any ltter it pleases, I think you can hide a letter but not "restrict" a letter. If a letter is not in actual use are you sure you can prevent drives from taking it?

OK. So after playing around with win7mgr's hide/restrict options I have some not very interesting findings. It allows for either current user or all user hiding and restricting.

The only way to force a drive letter is to actually choose one from disk management, regardless if it's a brand new hd or not. Letters aren't taken so much as they are chosen. Even if I use the restrict feature for all users on a letter, in disk mngmnt-change drive letter, you can still choose that same letter, providing it's not in use of course, but in explorer.exe you will not be able to open it.
DoubleCommander can itself, hide any drive letters you wish. My majicjack works fine with both hide and restrict all users even if I unplug it and plug it back in. Same with my printer letters. As long as I don't assign one of the lower letters to an actual drive, flash or otherwise, it works just fine when plugged back in and will obviously keep the same letter it had before.
Like I said, just choose a high on the alphabet letter and you'll be fine

As I use double commander using the latest snapshot, even if I hide a letter, but not restrict it, I can see and open it. Explorer simply can't see it. I use Z for my flash for this very reason.

Once you set the letter on a drive, it should remain the same across removing and plugging back in. If you're reformatting a drive, then the partitions are gone, and new partitions will have new IDs, so Windows won't know what letter to put for it. There's no way for it to know that partition is analogous to a different no-longer-existing partition.