This post is somewhat inspired by the recent topic of naming a CD drive, but mostly out of my own frustration with Windows, an OS still stuck in 1984 unfortunately.

My issue is being able to consistently access specific drives on a particular Windows machine using the same convention. I don't so much care what that convention is, it just has to be consistent.

The problem... Rebooting my Windows system sometimes causes drives to come up with different drive letters which makes them lose their network share properties, including names.

I have one external USB drive always connected to my Windows PVR/server. 50-80% of the time I also have an additional external drive connected. The main complication I think may be that these disks are formatted HFS+ (for the Mac) and I am using MacDrive to let Windows see/use them.

I have always used Disk Management to give these disks specific drive letters. I've also enabled sharing on them and given them specific share names. They've been accessible on the machine itself using these drive letters as well as their share (UNC) paths. For example, my music disk is assigned drive letter "S" and a share name of "Media300" allowing it to be accessed as "\\tvpc\Media300"

The volume name of the actual disk is also Media300, but that doesn't seem to mean anything at all in Windows.

I believe the new version of MacDrive is preventing the drive from coming back as "S" after a reboot. Instead it gets mapped to "H" and my other drive instead of coming up as "M" (as I've assigned it) also resets to "I"

As you can imagine this is a huge issue because different server software (like my music server and PVR software) want to access these drives in some consistent manner that's been defined in their prefs/settings. When the drive letters change the software fails to see the drives and they also disappear from view for all networked machines since they no longer have share properties. That also means they can't be accessed by UNC path from the host machine itself.

Even if I were to be content with the drive letter assigned by Windows, this could also be a problem with re-plugging disks in a different order, causing drive letters not to match up to the previous plugging.

Does anyone have any creative solutions to this issue? Perhaps a start-up program that can reset my shares and drive letters (to whatever I define) based on Volume Name or even Volume ID?