Can you change drive letters on a cloned hard drive to be different from one another?

[in66732]

I already had and esata docking station for use with my hot-swappable SATA hard drives, but when I saw a two port docking station with built in cloning capability without a computer I wanted that one to so I bought it.

I had an unformatted unused hard drive which was identical to one I had been using to store my music videos so I use the independent, no computer, cloning capability of my new docking station. I really wanted double copies on only the best music videos and intended to delete all the rest so that I might have two identically formatted dockable hard drives to store my videos.

The trouble is I wish to change the drive letters of one of the hard drives so that I may have two hard drives which I can simultaneously access from my new two port docking station. Accessing two hard drives from mice docking station is no problem if I use to previously formatted hard drives with different drive letters. However no matter what I do changing one of the drive letters on my cloned hard drives changes the other even though they now possess differing content and aren't identical. So is there any way to change one of my identical model swappable hard drives letters and not have the other cloned hard drive follow the change even though it is not plugged in to the hot-swappable port. If I plug in both hard drives to my new docking station I can only see one. But any other two hard drives gives me the desired results of seeing to drives at the same time which are accessible.

Before you ask let me tell you I am using Windows 7 and also have a partitioning program called "Paragon Hard Disk Manager™ 14 Premium Edition."

 

[thx1138v2]

Drive letters are logical drive designations for partitions, not disk drives. Drives are identified with numbers 0 through however many drives are attached - 1,2,3, etc. If a drive has only one partition, it will have a single letter assigned to it but you can have multiple partitions on a drive and each partition will get a different drive letter assigned to it.

At boot time drive letters are assigned to hard drive partitions. That's a function of the OS, not the hardware. I haven't worked with hot swappable drives but I imagine they get assigned drive letters to partitions at run time.

Beyond that you can assign an extra drive letter to a partition through Windows Explorer->Tools->Map Network Drive, but doing so doesn't reassign local drive letters. It only aliases a partition. So you could map C: to say F: but C: is still there. But the data on the partition can be accessed by either C: or F:. C: doesn't go away.

Having multiple partitions assigned the same drive letter is an error. How does the OS know what partition to read/write?

 

[in66732]

Drive letters are logical drive designations for partitions, not disk drives. Drives are identified with numbers 0 through however many drives are attached - 1,2,3, etc. If a drive has only one partition, it will have a single letter assigned to it but you can have multiple partitions on a drive and each partition will get a different drive letter assigned to it.

At boot time drive letters are assigned to hard drive partitions. That's a function of the OS, not the hardware. I haven't worked with hot swappable drives but I imagine they get assigned drive letters to partitions at run time.

Beyond that you can assign an extra drive letter to a partition through Windows Explorer->Tools->Map Network Drive, but doing so doesn't reassign local drive letters. It only aliases a partition. So you could map C: to say F: but C: is still there. But the data on the partition can be accessed by either C: or F:. C: doesn't go away.

Having multiple partitions assigned the same drive letter is an error. How does the OS know what partition to read/write?

Well it seems to me there must be a little more to it than what is stated above. I know that whether you are talking about USB flash drives or the swappable hard drives I am asking about Windows 7 seems to remember the drives not attached and its partitioning scheme and partitioning letters even though the drive is no longer attached. You can see this by clicking on start> computer both the drives attached and the partition and drive letters of the drives no longer attached will be shown the petitions and drive letters no longer attached will be listed as "devices with remove storage"

So it is obvious to me that it is more than just the attached drives that are at that defied by the Windows 7 OS. I think individual drives are explicitly remembered from some sort of designation that the Windows 7 OS uses must've been duplicated by my docking station which has cloning capability independent of my computer when I used its independent cloning feature. So could you or anyone help me figure out what designation was duplicated by this cloning feature and how to find it and change it?

 

[Hawkeye22]

It sounds like your docking station is intervening in some way. Have you tried to attach one of the drives internally and [strike]changinf[/strike] changing the drive letter within disk management, then putting it back in your dock?