Removable Disk Drive Drops after removing disk

[troverman]

I have a High-Rely hard drive enclosure I connect to my server for backup purposes. I have 5 of the removable drives, and I make a backup each night with BackupExec. The first night goes fine; however, after I remove that drive and insert the next night's drive, the entire disk and drive letter disappears out of My Computer (am running Server 2008 R2 Standard). The only way to remedy this is to reboot the server - not a task I want to do every day! Can someone help? I have tried 'safely ejecting the device' which does eject it, but the drive still disappears.

[mechbas]

Unless you radically change your hardware config. its unlikely that the drive letter will EVER change. What will change with each drive is the drive serial #, something that all MS OSs check depending on circumstance. Something else that changes ever so slightly is the actual drive's capacity.
Just as a check (without really doing anything with it), stick the same drive in that you used the night before and see what happens.

[rubberman]

Did you just disconnect it, or did you go to the "remove device" icon in your Windows (I assume you are running Windows) menu bar docking bay and ask it to safely remove the device from the os (same as unmounting it in Linux)?

[troverman]

OK, I needed to clarify - I installed a new VM host server and attached this device to it. The drive serial numbers do change - but how can I get around this? Windows Server 2008 R2 STandard; yes, I tried the 'safely remove device' which it couldn't be stopped, so in disk management I disabled the disk then unmounted, but it still went away.