In a pickle with multiple external hard drives

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crockny

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My filing system is out of control. I shoot a lot (almost daily) and I shoot birds a lot on a continuous setting - so even after culling I have a ton of photos. My working files are on an EHD and my backup is on another. Files from years previous to 2014 are on yet other EHD's which get plugged in and unplugged. An EHD which was once on the "F" drive might be on the "L" drive when I plug it back in. It takes forever for the folders to populate when I do "find missing files" ... it's getting a bit confusing and unwieldy.

Is there any way out of this mess? Perhaps I should put the "important" files on my C drive or a gold CD?
 
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Hello,

For external drives, I set the drive letter to something in the R to Z range. Unless you have enough of them that two would have the same drive letter, and be plugged in at the same time, they generally won't change drive letters after you manually set them. The setting is done in the disk management utility. Right click on your computer icon, click manage, and then go to the disk utility. Right click on the drive in question, and select the option to change the drive letter.
You can also get to it by typing diskmgmt from the start menu.

Dave
 
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So no matter where I plugged in that particular drive it would always be "R" for example?
 
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crockny said:
So no matter where I plugged in that particular drive it would always be "R" for example?
Click to expand...
Windows assigns drive letters in the order that the OS sees the drives or when a volume name is associated with a drive letter and that drive letter is available. Your primary disk drive is always C:\ and A:\ & B:\ are reserved for floppy drives and normally not used. Removable drives, SD/CF cards and thumb drives might be present causing more permanent EHDs to get pushed down the alphabet. You can Assign A:\ & B:\ to permanently attached EHDs although this can cause other issues with other apps that won't look for a "floppy", You can assign drive letters beginning at the end of the alphabet and work backwards and escape the collision with the OS auto assignment.

This becomes a problem with LR because LR stores the path to the master image copies in the LR catalog If Windows arbitrarily changes the drive letters, then LR no longer has a valid path to the master images copy.

Here are some instructions that we developed to help LR users overcome this Windows Problem

How to Re-assign a Drive Letter on Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7 and 8)
 
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So no matter where I plugged in that particular drive it would always be "R" for example?
 
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I followed those instructions and successfully changed my EHD to "R" and renamed it. However Lightroom is still calling it "L" and right clicking does not bring up any options at all ... I have closed and reopened LR, and unplugged and plugged in the drive ... help!
 
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In your folder panel you will see the folders with a (?) indicating that LR still thinks they should be where they were originally imported.
Right click on the top most missing folder in the folder panel and choose "Find Missing Folder" from the context menu. In the Windows dialog that opens navigate to that folder (now in drive R:\) and select it. This will update the LR catalog for that folder and all of its child (sub) folders. If necessary do this for any other top level folders that show the (?) in the Folder panel.
 
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Oy - I'm not sure what I did in the past to access files I wanted to work on ... but now it seems to be all screwed up. Following your instructions, LR now recognizes one of the parent folders on the "R" drive, but only one subfolder shows up (and there are many).

Also it's still showing a grayed out "L" drive and listing folders that don't exist on that drive (along with some that do)! Somewhere along the line in the past I must have confused things ...
 
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I suspect I should have unplugged "L" before renaming it "R" as LR is still recognizing "L" as a greyed out option as well as "R" ... meanwhile, if I try to update "R" to find all my many missing folders, it's asking if I want to merge folders - do I?
 
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