We all have this problem: Windows may assign a different Drive Letter to your removable drive every time. It all depends on the sequence that you have plugged in your storage devices to your computer. It causes trouble to any applications that require you to specify a file/folder path, and the path happens to be located on a removable drive like USB drives, FireWire devices, or even digital cameras configured to be connected as storage devices.
There are actually two solutions to this problem:
1. For Bamboo, since its update from 3.0.2, it can automatically detect if the path you specified is a removable / unpluggable drive. It will ask you if you really mean the "physical drive" or just the Drive Letter. In most case, what users really want is the same physical drive (which could be recognized by Bamboo by its Volume ID), but not the Drive Letter (which could be assigned differently by Windows every time you plug in the device).
Here is an example. When you type in or select by browsing the path "F:\photos", and Bamboo recognize this "F:" is in fact a USB flash drive, the following dialog will be prompted when you proceed with the Folder Pair Wizard, or save the Folder Pair Advanced Window.
Choose "Yes" and your path will be translated to something like "\\?\<volume id>\photos".
Choose "No" to let it remain as "F:\photos".
2. (Technical workaround) For general usages for other applications that require you to specify and save a file path or folder path with a removable drive letter, you can:
- Right-click "My Computer"
- Select "Manage" (Administrator right required)
- Select "Disk Management"
- Right-click the drive or partition concerned
- Select "Change Drive Letter and Path..."
- Assign an extra folder mount point for your drive (Note: the folder mount point must be located in a fixed local drive to serve the concerned purpose.)
Now, you can use the folder which the drive/partition is mounted to, instead of the Drive Letter, for your path specification.
Hope that this new feature provide by Bamboo from update 3.0.2 will help you get away from the drive letter hassle. So that you will not need to go through the technical clumsy workaround mentioned above.