Tree / Offline Disks

[matthewPOTOCHICK]

Is there a way to group offline disks separate from the active disk drives?  My tree lists offline disks alphabetically among the drive letters.  I would like to keep these separated or grouped by active and offline.

[Daan van Rooijen]

> Is there a way to group offline disks separate from the active disk drives?  My tree lists offline disks alphabetically among the drive letters.  I would like to keep these separated or grouped by active and offline.

I think the problem is that the drives in question are not considered removable by Windows. If they were, and they were off line, ThumbsPlus would show them in the Offline Disks section of the tree.

When you right-click on a drive in the tree you can check its volume properties. If the Volume type shown is 'local fixed disk' (rather than local removable disk), that's the problem. From a [link=http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-1713563/make-fixed-drive-show-removable-drive.html]discussion elsewhere[/link], not TP related, I gather that a program named Hotswap (http://mt-naka.com/hotswap/index_enu.htm) may be able to solve this.

[matthewPOTOCHICK]

Thank you for the quick reply!  I really appreciate it.  I downloaded the Hotswap utility that you mentioned, but was not able to correct the issue with it.  Do you happen to know where Thumbsplus reads the drive/volume information from?  Is there a place in the registry that I can edit the information?

These are USB hard drives, and yes, they are all coming up with Volume Type of "Local Fixed Disk" instead of "Local Removable Disk" as other media types are.

[Daan van Rooijen]

> Do you happen to know where Thumbsplus reads the drive/volume information from?  Is there a place in the registry that I can edit the information?

No, apparently it's something that the drives themselves report to Windows (see [link=http://superuser.com/questions/809322/how-can-i-keep-windows-8-from-mounting-flash-drives-as-local-disks]this discussion[/link]). Have you checked the manufacturers website to see if they have a utility to change drive settings? Beyond that (well, and googeling for possible 3d party solutions), I'm afraid I don't really have any suggestions.

[matthewPOTOCHICK]

Thank you for all of your assistance with this.  You gave me some ideas to try.  I was not having much luck finding any utilities that would allow me to update the Operating System's classification of the drives, nor was I able to find a clean, easy registry update to get what I want.

The drives are external USB hard drives, and most of them are not easily accessible at the moment.  I don't want to purge the data from my database.  If I need to search for an image I can search the drive, but I don't need to go physically get it unless it contains something I need.  That being said, I took the next logical approach.

I use MSSQL for my Thumbsplus database.  I looked at the data in the Volume table and changed the vtype values for the drives in question to match removable USB drives and now everything is listed as I want.  The active drives are ordered by their drive letter, and inactive drives are listed alphabetically as offline.

There is only one side affect that I have noticed so far.  Thumbsplus views an Active Drive as a New Drive and lists the Active Drive Volume as offline.  This is easy to correct by simply changing the vtype back to 3 (Local Fixed Disk)

I really appreciate all of your assistance with this!  I will let you know if I make any further progress.  Thank you, very much!