WARNING: New Google Drive app steals a drive letter

[h00ter]

I did a quick search and didn't find anyone else talking about it so here I am.

Warning: The new Google Drive Desktop App now takes your designated Google Drive folder and mounts it as a device in your "This PC." By doing so it steals a drive letter (precious for those of us running multiple drives), and does not let you remove it short of resorting to registry hacks. It only lets you change the drive letter.

The Google Forums has a discussion going on work arounds, but most involve editing registry strings which, if done improperly can mess a lot of things up. Link here.

 

I can't imagine the internal team meeting where someone thought it was a good idea to take the folder an end user has already designated, and decide to mount it as a drive, without asking the affected user if it was okay. I can only imagine some poor sysadmin getting phone calls about why people can't find files anymore because Google Drive updated itself and stole a drive letter.

 

 

 

[thekingofmonks]

What if it was removed with diskpart?

[h00ter]

24 minutes ago, thekingofmonks said:

What if it was removed with diskpart?

I don't think it will work?

It seems to be inserting a shortcut. Would diskpart recognize that? The "drive" itself doesn't show up in device manager or disk management.

[thekingofmonks]

Just now, h00ter said:

I don't think it will work?

It seems to be inserting a shortcut. Would diskpart recognize that? The "drive" itself doesn't show up in device manager or disk management.

You're right, it probably won't recognize it as anything.

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, h00ter said:

I can't imagine the internal team meeting where someone thought it was a good idea to take the folder an end user has already designated, and decide to mount it as a drive, without asking the affected user if it was okay. I can only imagine some poor sysadmin getting phone calls about why people can't find files anymore because Google Drive updated itself and stole a drive letter.

I feel like you are overestimating how many people this affects. I get that it's annoying for you since you seem to have a gazillion things mounted, but you are the exception rather than the norm.

Google could probably have asked 10,000 people and 9,999 would have been okay with this change, maybe even though it was easier to use. But that 1 other (you) see it as a big issue.

 

Or maybe I am misunderstanding you and what you mean is that if you update Google Drive, it will assign itself to G:, regardless of whether or not you already have a drive assigned to G:?

If that's what you mean then I can understand the frustration, as that seems like a massive oversight that would affect everyone with 5 or more drives mounted (which I don't think is too uncommon).

[h00ter]

3 hours ago, LAwLz said:

I feel like you are overestimating how many people this affects. I get that it's annoying for you since you seem to have a gazillion things mounted, but you are the exception rather than the norm.

Google could probably have asked 10,000 people and 9,999 would have been okay with this change, maybe even though it was easier to use. But that 1 other (you) see it as a big issue.

 

Or maybe I am misunderstanding you and what you mean is that if you update Google Drive, it will assign itself to G:, regardless of whether or not you already have a drive assigned to G:?

If that's what you mean then I can understand the frustration, as that seems like a massive oversight that would affect everyone with 5 or more drives mounted (which I don't think is too uncommon).

I probably am the outlier. I don't think Google would be stupid enough to steal the letter from a drive that has already been assigned G:. If anything it would pick the subsequent letters from the list.

The bigger issue is control. Making unilateral changes to someone's system, without informing them, or giving them a choice about the change, is at best bad form, and at worst, shady.

[johnbrel]

@h00ter

I created an account to thank you for your trouble of writing this down. 

I lost a drive letter (F) and didn't know how to get it back. It was there in explorer as a network drive but if I chose 'disconnect' (or 'dismount' - my system isn't English) in explorer, it would complain that the drive didn't exist.

Issuing 

net use && net share

didn't show the drive letter.

 

You may be an outlier, but in my case I don't have so many drives, but just 1 network drive that's a bit fickle. And so Google Drive determined at one point that it could steal this drive letter, wreaking havoc on my system.

So there are more scenarios in which this can be a problem and I think you're rightfully doubtful about this design decision.

(Even changing the drive letter to something unused in Google Drive didn't seem to make it available. However, just issuing

net use F: \\myshare\mydrive /persistent:Yes

connected the share to the drive letter again, without a restart.)

 

Anyway, thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I wouldn't have known where to look otherwise!

John