Assigning drive letters to removable media

[Sgood1971]

Hi all,

I have a kind of weird problem here. First the specs.

Windows XP - SP1 (Work will not allow us SP2 yet)
Novell Network
Many mapped drives (I only have E:\, W:\, and X:\ available.)
Sandisk 512MB Cruzer thumb drive.
Palm Tungsten |C with 128MB SD card using
Card Export to get drive letter access to the SD card.

I know that the card export software is not the problem, as I get the same issue using my other thumb drive.

Now the problem.

If I plug in my thumb drive, Windows assigns it drive letter E: and the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon in the tray refers to "USB Mass Storage Device (E:)". I can either plug in another thumb drive or click "Connect" on card export and Windows makes it's USB device plugged in sound and the tray icon will give me the option to stop.

USB Mass Storage Device
USB Mass Storage Device (E:)

It does not assign a drive letter to the second device. If I stop both devices and connect device 2 first, it will still not assign a drive letter to that device. If I then plug in device 1, it will still get E:\. I have to uninstall whichever device Windows recognized first to get a drive letter for the other one.

I don't know if I explained this adequately or not, if you need further info just let me know.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[D.Arbib]

Curiously having two drives, loading XP on to the primary drive "C" the installation insisted it was "F" whilst returning "D" OK.

I then reinstalled XP and for a reason I don't know it then recognized "C" properly.

I don't know if this helps.

[Sgood1971]

I appreciate the response, but Windows is fine. (And reinstalling is not an option here at work.) My issue is with removable drives.

Thanks again.