DVD Drive letter changes after swap then reverts after reboot

[JudgeGarth]

On my Windows XP system I had an "E" drive which was a DVD-Read/Write Drive and an "F" drive which was a CD Read-only drive. Since the "F" drive was no longer opening and closing, I decided to replace it with another DVD-Read/Write drive (Sony DRU-840A). I unplugged everything, opened it up and swapped the drive. (The old drive jumper was set to CSEL, so that's what I set the new one to).

After the swap, I booted up and the new drive came up as "K" (which was the next available "new" letter). I tried everything out, played a CD and a DVD and everything was fine. I rebooted again and now the new drive comes up as "F". Everything works and I'm glad it went back to "F", but why the temporary change?

Also, what does 'CSEL' mean as opposed to 'Master' or 'Slave'? Before I took the old one out, I was expecting it to be a Slave, but it was set to CSEL.

[aedipuss]

csel is cable select. it is used by some motherboards instead of master/slave. it just means that master or slave is provisioned by the position of the drive on the cable. end is master, middle is slave.

windows just found the "hole" in the drive letters and filled it after the reboot. you are lucky it didn't move the hard drives around. next time go to control panel/adminstrative tools/computer management/disk management and change the drive letter yourself.

[Krispy Kritter]

HDD letters shouldn't change as they have preference over CD/DVD drives. The exception being if you have your HDD's using multiple partitions. The primary partitions of the HDD get first preference, then additional drives (CD/DVD), then secondary partitions.

As noted above, you can always change the drive letters manually if you don't like the auto arrangement.