USBDLM

By saying that USBDLM is short for USB Drive Letter Manager, I quickly reveal that this tool can be used to control the drive letters assigned to USB drives. USBDLM can assign a certain letter to a USB device, can reserve letters so they won’t be used for local drives, can assign the following letter if the current letter is used by a network share, can extract the letter from the volume label, can remove a card reader’s drive letter until a card is inserted, and more.

USBDLM is a Windows service. The good thing is that by running as a Windows service, USBDLM is not tied with the user’s privileges; the user doesn’t need special privileges to change USB drive letters. But, to get USBDLM up and running, you will have to do a bit of work.

It’s not as simple as running an executable setup file, you’ll have to manually get USBDLM up and running. Instructions on how to do that are available in the Help file that accompanies USBDLM. The aforementioned Help documentation is also available as an online HTML version.

USB Drive Info comes bundled with USBDLM. What it does is it provides a graphical alternative for quickly changing mount points. Run USB Drive Info with admin privileges, right click a USB drive, and assign that drive a custom letter.

USBDLM is free software. It is freeware for private and educational (schools, colleges, universities) use only. If you plan on using it for commercial purposes, you need to get a license. You can use it for free for 30 days, and then you need to get a license.

Manage drive letters assigned to USB devices with Uwe Sieber’s USBDLM (USB Drive Letter Manager).