kb50

Used to go thru this a lot wiht Vista and etc, even XP. Windows reorders the drives if ANY hardware changes take place. Just unplugging and plugging drives causes this. Its because it sees it at a different address perhaps or enumerates it to something else. Even though you plugged them into the same SATA channels or IDE spots it just wants to reorder them., so it remembers your OLD hardware settings in the registry, and instead of removing the missing pieces, it instead creates new ones. And it does not automatically reorder anything so instead it just assigns new letters. The original drive letters end up in cyberspace so to speak. (One more reason why Linux Rules in this area, as it has no drive letters that YOU the end user have to deal with. Linux just reassigns the drives every time you boot it, so changes to drive locations it does not care about as it does not store them in a registry). Chalk up 1 for Linux, 0 for Windows. While you were in disk management you could have resolved it rather than going thru the steps you mentioned to get it back. If you right click on a drive you can change the drive letter right there. Its a 2 step process to get it all re-ordered and one that is painstaking if you have a LOT of drives attached. Basically you take and change drive letter of a D drive to free up the D letter.. Say it shows you have drives from C to F (hard drives) So if you want all your hard drives to be C, D, E, F and in a particular order etc, you take the D drive and assign it a letter of Z or something. Then you go thru each hard drive and assign them to the once D drive then E then F. You do this by right clicking and then lieft click on Change Drive Letter. A drop down list appears and you can assign the D drive I would pick on the LAST drive like F and assign it to Z. So you end up then with C D E then you take the D and E drives and reassign them to whatever letter you want them to be. If they are all the same I would suggest you label each one with a unique name (Rename function here or in explorer) Then take the Z drive and assign it back to F or whatever the last letter remains. If you have to you can also reorder your DVD/CD drives and even reorder letters of the removable drives. Some computers dont have card readers some do. You can reorder everything to the way you like it. .Then reassign like DVD drives to G and H or whatever letters you like. Assigning them to say K and L gives you room to add more drives in a logical order. That might be overkill however. You can basically reorder anything that Storage Management Snap in sees. Then just a restart after you exit out of drive management and all is well. (Until you once again change out any internal hard drives). If your installing a lot of CD or DVD software most modern stuff will seek out what it needs to find when installing, as it looks at your drives. if the drives get re-assigned due to hardware changes, then older software MIGHT not find the CD or DVD especially with copy protected names. SO you may want to consider assigning your CD and DVD drives to a high letter like X and Y but that might be overkill. Whatever. But by doing that your almost guarantee no matter what you hook up those drives are so far away from the normal assignments that everything remains working. I only think it would apply to games that exclusively look at your optical drives, etc. Most new games will not care what drive the media is inserted to.

I recently tried to get all of the windows updates for Windows 7 Ultimate x64. While it downloaded aboui 72 and I installed each one, but when I go to windows update after that and after rebooting, it shows another 117 to download and install and then after that another 81 or so. How or where can one get all of the current updates to download. In other words UL lists that have more than the amount shown. The reason is to include as manay as possible onto the DVD and slipstream as many as possible to avoid the download times. I am doing this as I often restore other peoples badly virused etc computers and want to save a lot of time. I have the Nlite application to build the DVD with (havent even tried that yet) but clear instructions seem to be online. Also wondering where windows stores the already installed updates, when it downloads them. Perhaps can use those to slipstream? The standalone ones if I open them with Winrar or 7zip seems to show all the individual items in several folders. I am wondering if those are replication of how the windows WUSA program is used to install the updates manually. But the main 1st question is how to get all the updates right up to the current. I had tried WSUSoffline but it keeps hanging on some glb folder for the .net45 update and never gets past it saying I have a file error. It used to work in the past, but now appears to be broken. I reinstalled and ran it but it just keeps running into that error at some point. Is there a utility that allows you to install all of the standalone updates without any user intervention even if the updates do not apply to skip past those ones?