Hard drive letters change on their own

I have 2 internal hard drives, C & D, and one external hard drive E. My
CD/DVD drive is F. Several times recently whenb I've turned the computer on,
the E & F drives have swapped letters, then I have to go into disk management
to change them back again.

I could keep them the other way round, but will have to change the location
of my backups and many shortcuts will also need to be changed.

Does anyone know why this should be happening? If so can I stop it happening?

Thanks

"Calomax" <Calomax@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:B259C8E2-EEDC-43B9-B279-92B3D2CDAA87@microsoft.com...
>I have 2 internal hard drives, C & D, and one external hard drive E. My
> CD/DVD drive is F. Several times recently whenb I've turned the
> computer on,
> the E & F drives have swapped letters, then I have to go into disk
> management
> to change them back again.
>
> I could keep them the other way round, but will have to change the
> location
> of my backups and many shortcuts will also need to be changed.
>
> Does anyone know why this should be happening? If so can I stop it
> happening?
>
> Thanks

My guess - the external drive was NOT there at startup so the CD was
assigned E . Windows assigns them in sequence , so the next drive then
became F.

To avoid this, assign the CD a different letter further down the alphabet.
I have mine set as R: and W: ( Years ago I bought my first CD burner, so
assigned the letters for (R)ead and (W)rite and kept that way on all of my
PC's since.)
Then the external drive would become E: whether there at boot time or not.

Calomax wrote:
> I have 2 internal hard drives, C & D, and one external hard drive E. My
> CD/DVD drive is F. Several times recently whenb I've turned the computer on,
> the E & F drives have swapped letters, then I have to go into disk management
> to change them back again.
>
> I could keep them the other way round, but will have to change the location
> of my backups and many shortcuts will also need to be changed.
>
> Does anyone know why this should be happening? If so can I stop it happening?


ZoneAlarm 6.5 and Norton GoBack are reported to cause this.