Hi All,

I'm having a problem with some of my external USB drives in Windows 7. I've been working on a project on a 3TB external HDD (WD MyBook) and needed to hand the work in progress off to a second editor. I thought the best way would be to grab another identical drive and copy everything over. Trouble is, when I plug in the new drive, the old one is no longer recognised due to a drive letter conflict. No problem - I can just change the drive letter, right? Well, I try to change the drive letter on the new drive, and it also somehow changes the original drive as well. Doesn't matter if both drives are plugged in, or just one, but if I change the drive letter on either one of the drives, then plug in the other drive, it also re-assigns the drive letter for that disk to the same thing as soon I plug it in. I've tried all sorts of combinations of plugged/unplugged when changing the drive letter but I just cannot possibly get Windows to recognise these two drives at the same time. It is almost as though Windows thinks these are actually the same disk, and any changes made to one get applied to the other as soon as it is plugged back in.

Either one of these disks is mountable at the same time as any of my other 1/2 dozen current working disks, but when I try to plug these two in at the same time - nada. It's also worth mentioning that these are the only 2 disks I have that are completely identical - same brand, model, year, size, etc.

Any one ever had this problem before or know a way to fix it?

Also I'll add that I just tried to re-assign the drive letters on my laptop and the same thing happens.

The original drive is exFAT, I've tried formatting the new blank drive to both exFAT and NTFS and I get the same result with both.

I've had that issue with the portable WD My Passport drives, but as I don't usually plug multiples in at once I never looked for a fix.

FWIW I have a stack of MyBook drives that I assigned letters to on Windows 7 and they are working perfectly with no problems while 10 are connected. The ones I'm using are all the same model: WDBACW0030HBK-NESN.

As a work around, why not copy the project to another drive, then cut-and-paste to the drive you want it on?

Just a thought.

Dave

I had a similar problem, and I had to use:

Control Panel -> System and Security -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management
Storage -> Disk Management
Right Click on the External Drive -> Change Drive Letter and Paths

HTH