External Hard Drive Letter

So I've been trying to resolve the issue of a floating letter assignment for my external hard drive. When the computer goes into sleep mode or the hard drive is turned off, the drive letter moves up one letter when I start things up again. The real issue is that when I try to use disk management to reassign the letter, the previous letters it has been listed under (in this case, M and up) are not present. I don't get those letters back unless I do a full restart of my system. I don't unplug the hard drive, and I have a great deal of outdated shortcuts in my system now. Advice?

 

If you allocate the external drive a letter much further up the alphabet, eg X, Y, Z, this problem should be solved. Worked for me!

Roger

 

That's not a bad idea, but if I set it to X and find my hard drive later set to Z, I'm still going to be cursing at a carefree monitor.
Is there no eternal solution to this issue?

 

Why not just try it!

Roger