FSX installed on D: drive but DVD also wants D:

Hi

 

I have FSX installed on an internal sata drive D:. However my DVD drive also wants that drive letter so when I plug it in (it's internal and also sata) my D: drive disappears from windows 10 altogether. I have tried rescanning in disk management, also tried other partition programs but to no avail.

 

I do know that the D: drive shows up in the BIOS. If I unplug the DVD drive then D: shows up again.

 

My question is, If I assign D: another drive letter e.g K: can I change the FSX.CFG file so all instances of D: are changed to K: Would this work? I have searched the registry for any instances of FSX (Flight Simulator and flight simulator and FSX and fsx) but have only found one which doesn't appear to point to any hard drive.

 

Any one know?

 

Thankyou in advance.

Hi,

 

Short answer is YES and NO....

 

Some areas of the FSX.cfg MAY need changing - but the bigger issue will be the scenery.cfg file entries...

 

The entries in the scenery.cfg file falls into two categories - default FSX and non default FSX....default FSX entries only require a simple truncated pathname whereas non default ones require the full path - as shown in these examples from my setup...

 

Default areas:

 

[Area.098]

Title=1107 Base

Local=Scenery\1107

Layer=98

Active=TRUE

Required=FALSE

 

[Area.099]

Title=Africa

Local=Scenery\AFRI

Layer=99

Active=TRUE

Required=FALSE

 

Non default area:

 

[Area.143]

Layer=157

Local=D:\Addon Scenery\Object Libraries\EZ Scenery Library

Title=EZ Scenery Library

Required=FALSE

Active=TRUE

[Area.239]

Layer=238

Local=D:\Addon Scenery\Airports - Basic\UK

Title=: UK

Required=FALSE

Active=TRUE

[Area.265]

Layer=264

Local=D:\Addon Scenery\Airports - Detailed\EGXC RAF Coningsby

Title=EGXC RAF Coningsby

Required=FALSE

Active=TRUE

 

A better and easier solution would to permanently change the drive letter assigned to the DVD drive...this will have no impact on any install you have already made as no reference to the drive properties where the install was run from is recorded....

thank you Brian.

 

I never thought about the scenery addons. I think tomorrow or sometime soon(too much work and I'm retired too) I will bite the bullet and do it after saving copies of fsx.cfg and scenery.cfg.

 

I did think about changing the DVD drive, I have tried making it a usb drive on a usb 3 connection but it still obliterated by D drive from windows. Maybe I should try changing it first before delving into cfg files.

 

Thanks for the info.

You could actually, if you wished, permanently assign a drive letter to both the removable drive that contains FSX (so that it always seen as D:) and to the DVD....

 

There are a number of ways to permanently assign a new drive letter depending on:

 

A. Operating system (although it is almost identical for all Win versions bar naming conventions on which area to make the change)

B. Fixed or removal hardware.

 

Google is you friend here - simple search using the search phrase How to permanently assign a drive letter will throw up a variety of generic examples whilst being more specific - by adding the OS for example will throw more specific info...

 

That said this GUIDE covers it well....

Follow this guide to assign the DVD a different Drive letter.

 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/disk-management/change-a-drive-letter

Thank you all guys,

 

I shall look at both guides. I am using win10 and have been using disk management. I guess what I'm after is a way of telling windows programs i.e. Ttools etc where fsx is. Probably the best thing is to keep DVD as a usb one and only use it and plug it in when I need it, which is very rare.

 

thank you all once again.

In Win 10 you can rename drives to give them any letter you want, except for the C: drive, which by definition is the OS drive and must be present with Windows on it.

 

For some reason, it seems the Windows is most comfortable with the optical (CD or DVD) drive being D:, so just give the "other" disk drive the letter E: and install there.

 

Jorgen

you mentioned usb.

is the dvd drive a usb-dvd drive?

 

and how about that E: harddisk.

is that Sata (internal)?

Usb (so in external port)?

or e-sata (external-sata) (external port)?

While your at it and before going any further get yourself an SSD for FSX, the difference in load times is amazing