jmtd → log → Dropbox and drive letters
For long-winded reasons I'd rather not explain nor defend, my partner uses Dropbox for a large set of important files (~70G), which are stored on a removable drive. She is also a Windows user. Recently, by introducing a few new drives, I inadvertently changed the drive letter that is assigned to her portable device, which stopped Dropbox from working. Solving this properly is rather finicky so I thought I'd write down what I did.
The end goal is to try and ensure that the portable drive always gets the same
drive letter and that Dropbox is configured to use that drive letter, but
before I can get that far I need to get Dropbox syncing again. It used to be
F:
, and I opted for U:
going forward.
Luckily the extra letters I'd introduced were all partitions on a separate
hard drive from the OS, so I powered the machine down, unplugged the extra
hard drive and booted back up. This freed up the stolen drive letters, but
the portable drive did not re-inherit them. Running regedit
as an
administrative user and renaming keys in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices
moved the USB drive back to the correct letter, but I suspected the extra
hard drive would take precedence when it was back, so this was only an
interim solution.
With the portable drive back on F:
, the Dropbox client was happy once again.
However I needed to reconfigure the Dropbox client to use a different letter.
I wasn't happy with the idea of altering the Dropbox client's configuration
database under its feet, so I had to do everything "by the book". Luckily,
the client supports the notion of moving your Dropbox folder. Combined with
the command-prompt subst
command (run as the local user rather than as an
admin this time), I was able to clone the F:
drive to a virtual U:
drive,
and then ask Dropbox to move the folder.
subst U: F:\
This was pretty awkward. F:\Dropbox
and U:\Dropbox
are in fact the same
folder, so I needed to ask Dropbox to move it from F:
to something other
than U:
. I opted for U:\tmp
. The move took a long time (~2 hours).
The proper solution is to try and get a stable drive letter for her device. This can be achieved using a tool called 'USB Drive letter Manager', or USBDLM. USBDLM is free for educational use, and my partner is a teacher, which is lucky.
Once that's all sorted, reboot, insert portable device, ensure it's on the
right drive letter, and move the Dropbox folder back down to U:
. This time
the move was near instantaneous.