A few days ago my external hard drive changed its drive letter from E to H all of a sudden, so I searched on the internet and found a way to change it back manually. But the problem is, I had stuff installed on the hard drive when it was E before it changed to H, and when I changed it back to E, they don't seem to be working.
For people who play the Sims 2, the following may be easier to digest:
Before the whole disk letter changing thing happened, I owned University and Nightlife, and the game ran beautifully. After it changed to H and after I changed it back to E, I installed two new expansion packs I purchased recently (Seasons and Open For Business), and when I loaded the game, the University and Nightlife features were not there. It was as if they were never installed!
So I was wondering if it's because of the whole disk letter issue. and if it is, I'd greatly appreciate it if anyone can help me solve the problem (and also, it'd be good to tell me how I can prevent my hard disk from changing its disk letter again in future as well), because I've got tons of games and programs on the external hard drive and if everything just stop working like that then it'll be.. really, really awful. :(
Thanks a lot in advance!
About changing drive letters of external hard drives?
For one, it's better to run programs from the system drive and utilize external drivers for data storage (in other words, standalone files like pictures, videos, audio files, etc.) Unless you're referring to ISOs or other disc images and such. For one, it will most likely reduce performance of the program and two because if something gets moved around when the drive is disconnected - and something on the drive must reference it - it doesn't automtically synchronize.
However, I'm sure you have your reasons for doing this so I won't go any further there. The most usual cause of this happening is that another device was installed when the external drive was not connected that needed to make use of the drive letter in question. the best bet is to manually set the external hard drive's letter to one that is spaced out beyond what's already in use. For example, If I have drives C, E, F, G, H, and I (which I do), then I would set the drive letter to something like O because most likely I don't have so many devices that I can connect at once to take up J, K, L, M, and N to push the external hard drive back. I hope this makes sense. The drive letter assignment is usually dynamic for external devices - meaning any time it's disconnected and reconnected it doesn't necessarily use the same drive letter, just whichever is the next available one in line.
