Windows 10: Internal Storage Devices swap drive letters

The machine has a M.2 PCLe NVMe SSD (the system drive), an internal HDD storage drive, and an internal optical drive
The SATA controller was set as RAID at the factory. I never enabled RAID on the system by any means to create RAID volumes.

The BIOS lets me change the SATA Controller to RAID or to AHCI.
I recently made the change from RAID to AHCI in the BIOS using safemode boot procedure steps.

Something I didnt expect happening during this change was the internal optical Drive and the internal HDD swapping drive letters.
Maybe Im being a little overly apprehensive. If the data can't be restored one day for whatever reason, would keeping the drive letters the way they are assigned now and making all new backups of personal data, and creating new DVD rescue disks, and new backup DVDs be the more prudent step to ensure the data integrity for the lack of a better term ?

It's easy to reassign the drive letters following the excellent tutorial
Change and Assign Drive Letter in Windows 10 by @Brink which offers a way for correcting this on-board SATA port redirection that maybe occurred or whatever, except.....
every DVD burned, every personal file ever backed up on the external drive using SyncBackFree, the rescue DVD, all originally created with the opposite drive letters, draws concern of potential file unrestorability, and DVD data unreliability.

I only mention my skepticism changing the drive letter of a storage device back to what it originally was and potentially not being able to restore back ups only because some have attested that trying to restore personal files to the internal HDD lead to headaches.

Any comments and suggestions are welcomed and appreciated.

Not to get off the subject but,
The Storage controller driver that installed is a Standard Microsoft NVMe driver. Any suggestions on this generic driver are also very much appreciated.

:)

 

Cloning to SSD then swapping drive letters


@SamHobbs
What you want done is very simple and can be done in short period of time. Here's my suggestion:
There's 2 modes that Windows can be installed: UEFI and the old legacy MBR. Open Disk Management, look at the disk where your C drive is, if there's a

1. EFI System Partition, your Windows was installed using UEFI.
2. System Reserved partition, your Windows was installed using MBR

Next, Connect your SSD to an available Sata port (no need to format or do anything). Download: Macrium Reflect Free . Install and run. Follow the steps below:

1. From Macrium, click on image this disk under your C drive and save it to either an Internal or External Drive. This will create a single backup image of the whole disk containing your C drive.
2. Again, from Macrium, click on Restore tab and select the image created from step 1, Select your SSD as the destination drive, click Next->Finish
3. Exit Macrium. If your Windows was installed using MBR, Open disk management and make sure the SSD is marked "Active" else go to next step.
4. Shutdown your PC. Disconnect the HD containing Windows C drive then connect your SSD to it.
5. Reboot. Your PC should boot and the Windows should have C as the drive letter.

NOTE: The procedure above is to backup your Windows to an image file then copy it back to the SSD. This ensures proper cluster size aligment for the SSD. In addition, Macrium also perform Trimming for the SSD. This is more preferable than cloning.

 

Optical drive letters keep swapping

Open Disk Management (click Start, type diskmgmt.msc in the Search box, and press Enter).

1. In the lower pane, right-click on your optical drive and select "Change drive letter and paths"
2. Assign Y: to the first optical drive
3. Repeat step 1 for the second optical drive and assign Z:

 

Drive letter assignment to hot-swap drives being forgotten

You could create a batch file with diskpart that remove the drive letter and reassigns the one you want.
The drive number n should be last on list.

Initially


diskpart
list disk (to identify disk number)

Batch file e.g. letter.bat contains one line

diskpart /s letter.txt

and letter.txt contains

select disk n (n from above)
remove
assign letter= J (or whatever you want)
exit

and each time you swap drive, just run letter.bat.