Hard Disks numbers

[ciaooaic]

Hi everybody,

my bug report is about the numbers assigned to each hard drive. Hard Disk Sentinel ouputs an .xml file (in its installation folder) which I use to extract each hard drive's temperature using a powershell script. Unfortunately, sometimes, when I reboot the machine, the order of the drives changes. For example: drive letter G: is Disk #0 and drive letter D: is Disk #1. When i reboot, the numbers change. Now imagine how frustrating this can be having EIGHT hard disks.
I would be very grateful if you could fix this issue, or tell me if there is a way to configure hdsentinel to fix it.

Thanks!

PS:
Could you tell me how does Hard Disk Sentinel choose which number to assign to each hard disk, please?

[hdsentinel]

Hi,

Thanks for your message and the information.
However, I can confirm it is not a bug in Hard Disk Sentinel - but related to Windows itself.

Hard Disk Sentinel follows the numbering of hard disks assigned by Windows, exactly to prevent problems or confusion.
I mean if you open Computer (right click) -> Manage -> Disk Management, you can see the order of the drives assigned by Windows. Hard Disk Sentinel uses this order and numbering.

So the issue you described is caused by Windows itself: as in some reboots it may alter the order of the drives. This is a known situation, we discussed this on this forum previously with an user: after power on the system he has different order of drives compared to the order he got after a simple reboot.
This does not cause confusion in the operation of Hard Disk Sentinel (as it identifies hard disks by model ID, firmware and serial number - not the position) but I agree that it can be frustrating if you want same disk numbers every time.

A possible solution is to check and modify the driver version of the hard disk controller(s) where the hard disks are connected as a different driver version (may not be the latest one) may work better in this area. If you can use Report -> Send test report to developer option, it is possible to check the actual situation, drivers, connections and advise. (maybe if you can use Report -> Send test report to developer more times, eg. in "normal" and later in "swapped" situation, that would help).

Also you may try to swap drive(s) - as it may prevent the change of disk numbers.

[ciaooaic]

Thankyou very much for your explanation. I will try to check the drivers.
Great job with this software!

[ciaooaic]

SOLUTION!
I found a way to fix that problem.
You just have to create a .bat file to run at startup (using task scheduler, for example).
Thanks to the command line utility called mountvol.exe, each drive installed in you system is identified with a unique ID (for example \\?\Volume{ccca532c-24df-11e1-b2eb-0c6026344ce5}\).

• 1) Run the command line
  2) Type: mountvol
  3) You will get a list of volumes with the correspondent drive letter
  4) Take note of the the letter you want to assign to each volume, the letter can be anything, you can choose it (do not use C:\ which is system volume letter) (for example \\?\Volume{ccca532c-24df-11e1-b2eb-0c6026344ce5}\ -----> drive letter K:\)
  5) Open notepad, and write the following:

  Code: Select all

  @echo off
  mountvol [your drive letter] /D
  mountvol [your drive letter] [your volume number]
  exit
  

  Remember to put a space between the drive letter and the volume number!
  7) Here is an example of the script running on my pc:

  Code: Select all

  @echo off
  mountvol K:\ /D
  mountvol K:\ \\?\Volume{ccca532c-24df-11e1-b2eb-0c6026344ce5}\
  exit
  

  You can do this with EACH drive you have on your machine, just repeat the lines you just wrote under the previous lines.
  8) Now "save as" the file with notepad naming it volume.bat in any folder you want (I put it in C:\windows)
  9) Now just google around how to make a .bat file run at startup. The best way is to use task scheduler, (run the command line and write the following string: %windir%\system32\taskschd.msc /s ), you will find instructions on google or microsoft knowledge base website.

[ciaooaic]

Please, remove my previous post. It doesn't solve the problem.
Here is an explanation:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937251

[hdsentinel]

Thanks, yes - this is what I also found, and Microsoft does not really have a working solution for that ....

Anyway, your previous post can be helpful if there may be an issue with logical volumes, so I suspect it is better to keep