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DBE and USB Drive-Letter Assignments |
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In the right-hand pane below, DBE is displaying a directory from a USB flash drive which was read at some earlier time and the configuration then saved on exit from DBE. Drive G: was assigned to this USB device at the time it was read; and this is reflected in the drive letter shown at the bottom of the display above the volume name for that disk.
Fully expecting to read this USB device as the same drive, you might press the ';' key to read the directory currently being displayed by DBE. But if, as is the case in this example, in the meantime a different disk was inserted in a USB slot and just happened to be assigned to drive G:, when you inserted the first disk in a USB slot it couldn't use drive G: at the moment, so Windows reassigned it as the H: drive.
The second screenshot below shows what happens when you press ';' to read the directory being displayed.
Below, we see that indeed there is a directory named "G:\" on the disk in drive G: at the moment, but we also note that the displayed directory is on some disk other than [G8YZ31] DISKS which is currently occupying the G: drive.
All is well and good if Windows happened to pop up the 'Found New Device' dialog when you inserted the disk in the USB slot and you made note of the drive letter in use by the 'new' device. If it didn't (well, these things happen; and maybe you like it that way, too), the quickest way to handle it is to guess.
Well, the screenshot below indicates that the right guess was made; and CtrlH was pressed in response to the SCAN ANOTHER DISK DRIVE FOR DISPLAYED DISK/DIR option, rather than Enter being pressed (at which point a prompt for the drive letter would be issued).
Note that the drive has been changed to H: and also that nothing else has changed in the directory display. If you had chosen to press Enter and read any drive, the directory shown would have been dropped from the memory list and then re-read 'from scratch', and this would have eliminated the bright green REPLACE tags (shown as '-><-' in the tag area) and reset the status flags for all files in this directory.
As in the example, if you had active REPLACE tags in the directory, you could simply press AltG and then 'R' to start replacement mode. But if you had used the first option, pressing Enter, to read it, those tags would be gone.
So, in general, if you are in doubt about how drive letters are being handed out, use ';' to start a directory scan, and if the prompt shown above appears, use CtrlA..CtrlZ to indicate the drive; and this approach will let you keep those tags and statuses which had already been set, either by you or by DBE.
A SCENARIO
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