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Greenwood School District 50
Technology Planning and Implementation
2006 School Technology Project
January 2006

 

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Fixing Conflict Between Flash Drive and Network Drive

 

Each teacher has received a flash drive [1] with his or her laptop.  Some laptops come with two fixed disk drives already named (usually drive C: and drive D: [2]).  In those cases, the CD-ROM drive becomes drive E: and the first network drive becomes drive F:. 

 

If you are logged into the district network with your flash drive installed, Windows will assign drive F: to your flash drive and will drop your network connection.  This presents a problem with accessing all the network applications you need.

 

This problem can be fixed with the following steps (note, if you don’t have a drive-D: partition, you do not have this problem):

 

For computers with the extra "recovery" partition on the hard drive (a drive-D: partition), you can do the following to allow your flash drive to be recognized while on the network, without conflicting with the network drive F:

 

1.  Log onto the network and insert the flash drive in a USB port.

2.  Right-click My Computer.

3.  From the pop-up menu, choose Manage.

4.  Then choose Disk Management from the displayed options.

5.  Right-click the flash drive listed in the right pane.

6.  Choose Change Drive Letter and Paths from the list of options.

7.  Click Change and choose a drive letter (it's best to choose "G" because we will never assign that letter to a network drive).

8.  Click OK until all windows close.

9.  Reboot your computer and your drive letters should be present, including drive F: and drive G:.

10.  Every time the computer finds your flash drive from now on, it will be assigned the new drive letter.

 

 

Revised 2/8/06

[1]   A flash drive is also called a “thumb drive” and a “USB drive,” among other terms.

[2]   Drive C: is the normal drive for computer operation; drive D:, in this case, is a “recovery drive.”  It contains a copy or image of the software on drive C:.  If something goes wrong on drive C:, you can recover the operating system from drive D:.