* Solutions to the external drive conundrum
The advent of USB-connected hard drives, memory sticks, keychain storage and other portable devices (I even have a watch that stores 256MB of data via a USB cable) has certainly written finis to the floppy disk, but it’s also been a security problem since the drives are easily lost, stolen or mislaid. Also, those bent on stealing data can quickly copy things to a device they can wear openly on their wrist. Still, that’s a problem for another day (or a different newsletter). There’s a different problem I want to address in this newsletter – not a big problem, more of an irritant. But it’s an irritant that can keep your phone ringing.
One problem with the various portable drives is the sometimes seemingly random assignment of drive letters to them. Data that a user saved to the E: drive now appears on the H: drive. That’s a source of error messages (“The program H:Program FilesProgram Name is not accessible”) that confuses the user who knows they properly plugged in the portable device. Except now it’s “K:Program FilesProgram Name” that they should be looking for.
Microsoft did, finally, come up with a good solution to this situation a few years ago when it introduced Disk Manager with Windows XP. This allows you to mount a drive system as part of a different drive system similar to the Unix “Mount” command. So if you have a portable device you can make it appear as part of another, permanent drive.
For example, suppose your users have a drive C, a 1GB drive that uses the NTFS file system. You can define C:Host-dir as the mount point for a separate 512MB removable drive. So the folder MyDir on the removable drive can be addressed as C:Host-dirMyDir, no matter how many portable drives are in use and no matter how many different drive letters are randomly defined by the operating system. Your users’ programs work the same way every time and your phone stops ringing. Except in one instance (there’s always a catch, isn’t there?): If the user tries to delete a folder that’s stored on the mounted drive they may receive the error message “Cannot delete Foldername: Access is denied. The source file may be in use.” The problem is that the system tries to move the pointer for the folder into the recycle bin. But, since it sees the folder as C:Host-dirMyDir, it tries to move it into the C: drive’s recycle bin, not the one on the removable drive!
It’s the recycle bin that causes the problem and there are two workarounds:
* When you delete files or folders by using Windows Explorer, use the SHIFT+DELETE key combination. This bypasses the Recycle Bin.
* Open a command prompt window and use the rd /s /q command to delete the files or folders.
Both of these methods permanently delete the data. Well, of course they do – they bypass the recycle bin. You cannot recover the data unless you have a current backup. You may not want to tell your users about these methods, preferring to invoke them yourself only when absolutely required. Your choice. Probably best to decide based on your guestimate of what will minimize the times your phone rings.
