Windows 7 keep renaming my drive to a different letter when I have my external hard drive plugged in

Question

I have 2 external hard drives. Both are 2 TB and I connect them with Firewire 800.

I boot Windows 7 in Boot Camp on MacBook Pro so I have 2 partitions on my hard drive. One is my Windows partition which is C:, and the other is my Macintosh partition which is supposed to be D:.

But whenever I boot in Windows 7 with my 2 external hard drives plugged in, one of the external hard drive's partition takes up the D: letter no matter how many times I go to Disk Management and change my Mac partition back to D:.

I don't really care what letters my external hard drives are. But I really want my Mac partition to always be D:, otherwise a lot of my shortcuts won't work.

EDIT: For now I just changed my Mac drive to B. It took a while to fix all the shortcuts but now whenever an external drive gets plugged in, it gets assigned from C and later.

Answer 1

USB Drive Letter Manager (USBDLM) is free program that runs as a windows service that can control which drive letters USB drives get mapped to. You can use it to specify the drive letters for your two external drives (based on many factors, such as manufacturer ID or drive label) -- or more simply just use it to reserve D: so that it's not used for any USB device. Hopefully that will allow windows to consistently use D: for your Mac partition.