windows stupidly changing drive letters?

[DrEskaton]

I've noticed some resolume vjs having issues with external drives changing drive letters and them losing all their decks assigned in resolume.

this seems to happen often.

I would have thought you could assign a unique drive letter to every external when you format them or somewhere set up mappings in windows to avoid this, but apparently this doesn't work reliably.

surely there's a solution, I can't believe windows can't solve this stupid hangover from dos in 2006.....

[MoRpH]

You can permanently assign a drive letter to an external drive by going into Control Panel, Admin Tools, Computer management, Then in the Storage section, Disk managment, right click the drive and select to change drive letter. Set it to what ever you want. Everytime that drive is then plugged in it will always come up listed as that drive letter (unless your stupid and plug another drive in with the same assigned drive letter)

[sleepytom]

ok to clarify that slightly

the drive letters are unique for each installation of windows - it is not possible to assign a drive letter to a removable drive itself only to that drive in a particular windows installation...

if you reinstall windows you need to go to the computer management console and reassign your drive letters so they are the same as before. if you have a drive that is transferred between different computers then you need to set all the computers to use the same drive letters if you wish resolume decks to work.

this is one of the many ways in which windows sucks when compared *nix which has real paths regardless of physical drive positions...

anyway you can of course do a find and replace in your resolume deck files to sort out a changed drive letter. its unfortunate that the resolume deck files are not easy human readable files and that they contain non plain text chareters.. this makes editing them rather tricky

Compare how VJamm VJP files work to resolume decks, VJamm VJP files are much easier to edit as they are plain text with line breaks. VJamm also supports transferable patches where the paths are relative to the position of the VJP files.
you can also use the VJP editor software to edit VJP files without needing to get into text edit programs.

i'd suggest to the resolumers that they improve / change the way the deck files work for the next major release - whist we can blame windows a bit for being stupid but it is possible to work around these issues with clever programing.

[sleepytom]

as a foot note i should add that the worst drives for confusing drive letter issues are combo firewire / usb drives - as each of the drive interfaces is unique windows will assign a different drive letter to the drive depending on if its plugged in on firewire or usb

ARRRGGGGHHHHHH

[MoRpH]

Yeah tom is correct, I jsut thought you meant same computer different drive letters not multiple computers.

And I agree with plain text deck/layout files as you say tom, thats the way they work also in OpenTZT

[ASMD]

Hey, thanks for the tips. I'm looking to get a fast external drive soon so I'll bear that mind!

[DrEskaton]

grid pro has an auto start up function that pops up a window if it can't find a clip. It will then say "I can't find this clip, tell me where it's gone". It then searches for all the other missing clips on the same volume and reassigns them automatically. windows programs should be able to do this as well surely? hey resolume devs?

ah good tip about the interfaces being different so you really need to make sure you plug an external in through the same interface each time and set up mappings for each external the same on each computer.. ARGGH...

does anyone know if they've finally fixed this issue in vista? does it have proper file pathes?

[PilotX]

Originally Posted by DrEskaton

grid pro has an auto start up function that pops up a window if it can't find a clip. It will then say "I can't find this clip, tell me where it's gone". It then searches for all the other missing clips on the same volume and reassigns them automatically. windows programs should be able to do this as well surely?

they can, after effects does this with missing files

[DrEskaton]

i knew it was possible I was trying to suggest that vj developers should solve this issue....

seems to me the best way to motivate a windows vj developer is to say "a mac program can already do this"