Have you ever wondered why the newly installed disk gets a drive letter in the middle of the alphabet even though E: is free? Why that network drive refuses to connect with the drive letter you want? The reason is most probably that the drive letter you want has been reserved for removable drives even though no media is inserted. This has been an problem for some time now since many computers are shipped with built-in multimedia card readers.

In the above example, if you for example try to map a network drive as F: it will fail because it is already reserved by a SD card reader, even when no card is inserted. The solution: change the drive letters to something that you know will never conflict.

Here’s a PowerShell script that automatically reassigns drive letters on removable drives to a predefined set of “approved” drive letters. The script uses the standard mountvol tool, so it also works in older Windows versions.

Replace-DriveLetters.ps1

$ForbiddenDrives = @("E:","F:","G:","H:")
$AllowedDrives = @("W:","X:","Y:","Z:")

$RemovableDrives = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Volume -Filter "DriveType=2"
$DrivesToReassign = $RemovableDrives | Where-Object { $ForbiddenDrives -contains $_.DriveLetter }
$i=0

foreach ($Drive in $DrivesToReassign) {
     &mountvol $Drive.DriveLetter /D
     &mountvol $AllowedDrives[$i++] $Drive.DeviceID
}

In an Enterprise Environment this is easy to implement in for example Microsoft Deployment Toolkit. That way your clients will never fail mapping network drives.

/ Andreas