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alanh72597336
Participant
September 20, 2026
Open for Voting

Retaining external drive letters on different USB sockets

  • September 20, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 16 views

I have more external USB drives than USB sockets on my PC.  This requires me to occasionally swap the main USB drive holding my RAW files to another socket or to reconnect after it has been removed. Lightroom often doesn’t recognize that it is the same drive and allocates a new drive letter, consequently it says files not found and I have to re-sync all of the files which loses the history of which files have been edited.  Could you have Lightroom recognize the drive and allocate it the original drive letter and retain it even after removal.

      1 reply

      Per Berntsen
      Community Expert
      Per BerntsenCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      September 20, 2026

      Drive letters are managed by Windows – not Lightroom Classic.
      When an external drive is connected to your computer, Windows will assign the first unused drive letter in the alphabet. The next time you connect this drive, the first unused letter may be a different one, so the drive letter will change.

      You can prevent this from happening by assigning a letter towards the end of the alphabet to your main external drive. If you choose Y or Z, you can probably be certain that it will never change.
      In the File Explorer, right click This PC, choose Manage, then choose Disk Management, right click the drive, and choose Change drive letter and paths.
       



       

       

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