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Can I access to a disk drive using volume ID instead of a drive letter in Windows? It could be very useful for external drives.

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up vote 5 down vote accepted

You can use mountvol in the command prompt to get the ID of the volume you want to access.

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This IDs can be used to open an explorer window, independent from the drive letter

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To create a shortcut to the drive, create a new batch file with this content:

start \\?\Volume{1b3b1146-4076-11e1-84aa-806e6f6e6963}\
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Yes, it is what I searched for long! Now I just need to call the mountvol command to get all volume ID's. Then using path like "\\?\Volume{}" I can access to drive with needed ID (if it presents). Thank you! –  olvin Aug 24 '12 at 8:10
Yes, this method works with Explorer and while copying files with command line. But unfortunatelly TrueCrypt does not accept such path to a keyfile =( –  olvin Aug 26 '12 at 20:55
Unfortunately it only works if you have NetBIOS and the RPC Locator running, so this won’t work if you have hardened Windows. In addition, you’ll probably need to keep several network-related services and drivers running to use it (Workstation, Computer Browser, Server, TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper, NetBT, DHCP, DNS, etc.) This is dumb since these are local volumes. :-| –  Synetech Apr 12 at 22:30
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I prefer to use absolute drive letters for flash drives. There are adequate assignments for just about anybody unless you have 20 or more flash drives.

In Windows 7 use Windows to format and assign a drive label or if the drive already has a label, use command line "Label (drive letter) to give it a label of your choice.

Then go to control panel, system and security, administrative tools, computer management, disk management to select the drive with the label you created by right clicking on the drive, select change drive letter and paths and assign the volume to a specific drive letter. It will always mount to that drive letter if it is available.

I have labeled drives that contained live data and the labeling did not affect the existing data in any way. It seems to work just like it did on floppies back in the good old days

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