For practical reasons, one might want to fix the drive letter that is assigned to a particular DDP volume in Windows.
This can be done using the "Administrative Tools" from the Windows Control Panel.
Run the "Computer management" tool and go to "Disk Management" under "Storage" as shown below:
From this window, you can right click on any drive and select "Change Drive Letter and Paths...".
The DDP volumes are marked as "AVFS" or "AVIDFS" if you installed the package for AVIDFS emulation.
This method is useful when the DDP volumes need to be mounted with the same letter on a particular Windows computer, but if all client machines need to mount the DDP volumes with the same drive letter, it can become time consuming to follow the same procedure on each of them.
In a such a scenario, a tool like USBDLM can be used in order to fix the drive letter for each DDP volume no matter which Windows client mounts it.
More generally, USBDLM is a Windows service that gives control over Windows drive letter assignment for all kind of drives.
This tool can be downloaded here and needs to be installed on all computers where you need to fix the drive letter.
Once setup as per the instructions below, USBDLM will read a configuration file that will stay on each DDP volume and determine what drive letter should be used.
After downloading USBDLM, you need to install it by unzipping the USBDLM.zip file to "C:\Program Files".
Then go to "C:\Program Files\USBDLM" and execute the _edit-ini.cmd which will create and open the configuration file called USBDLM.INI.
In the USBDLM.INI file that opened, go to the "Drive Letters" section at the bottom and edit it as the following example:
;----------------------------- Drive Letters ---------------------------------- [DriveLetters1] Letters=X,Y,Z [DriveLetters2] BusType=iSCSI FileExists=%Drive%\letter.ini Letters=%Drive%\letter.ini
The "DriveLetters1" section determines the letter that should be used for any mounted drive that is not a DDP volume.
In our example, the letters X, Y and Z will be used if available when a generic drive is inserted. If you don't need to specify the letters that should be used for none DDP volumes, you can delete these two lines.
The important part is the "DriveLetters2" section which says that any iSCSI drive (DDP volume) which has "letter.ini" file in its root should be mounted with the drive letter that is specified in that configuration file. After editing the file, save it and close it.
In order to specify which drive letter should be used for a particular DDP volume, create a new "letter.ini" file in its root and edit it as per the following example:
[DriveLetters] Letter=F
In this example, any Windows client where USBDLM is running will mount the DDP volume will the letter F.
After saving the file, the DDP volume root should contain a "letter.ini" file with only these two lines as shown below:
Finally, execute the _service_register.cmd under "C:\Program Files\USBDLM" in order to register USBDLM as a Windows service. The service will start automatically.
As a test, disconnect the DDP volume and reconnect it in order to see if the drive letter you specified is correctly used.
Note that you can change the USBDLM.INI or letter.ini file without restarting the service because it's checked for changes each time a new drive is attached.
Also remember that you need to install and configure USBDLM on all other Windows clients so that they can read the configuration file in each DDP volume and use the specified drive letter.