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Portable HD: making shortcuts (solved)

[Tycho?][Tycho?] As elusive as doubtRegistered User regular
edited June 2008 in Help / Advice Forum
Heya. So I've got a portable hard drive with a variety of software on it, firefox, utorrent, trillian and so on. I want to make a short cut for these, so that I dont have to dive into the directories every time I want to launch them. However, I seemingly cannot make regular shortcuts, since it includes the drive letter in the path. Since I use my drive on a variety of computers that are not mine, I have no control over what letter the portable drive is assigned. And so the path for the shortcuts is wrong.

How should I go about fixing this problem?

mvaYcgc.jpg
[Tycho?] on

Posts

  • EchoEcho ski-bap ba-dapModerator, Administrator admin
    edited June 2008
    Do you make the shortcuts on the drive itself? If so, set the path to "./Foo/Bar/spyware.exe" etc. Note the ./ it starts with.

    A period means the local directory.

    Echo on
  • [Tycho?][Tycho?] As elusive as doubt Registered User regular
    edited June 2008
    Man, I wish I had asked this 6 months ago.

    But yes, it worked, thank you.

    [Tycho?] on
    mvaYcgc.jpg
  • DaenrisDaenris Registered User regular
    edited June 2008
    What OS? In XP at least (probably/possibly Vista) you can set up a folder on your hard drive as a mount point for an attached drive or USB stick.

    Create a folder on your C drive somewhere (name it something you'll remember, and leave the folder empty)
    Plug the drive in
    right click on My Computer
    click Manage
    go to Disk Management
    find your removable drive
    right click on it and select Change Drive letter and Paths
    Click Add
    choose Mount in the Following Empty NTFS folder
    click Browse and select the folder you previously created

    Now when you plug in the drive it should mount under that folder. So you can create a shortcut pointing to like C:/RemoveableDrive/Firefox.exe and it should work no matter which drive letter the drive gets. This way you can have shortcuts on your desktop or whatever that actually point to a program on the USB drive.

    Daenris on
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