How can I stop my external hard drives being renamed by Lightroom?

Since early December I have had innumerable problems with LR and my external hard drives. I have 3 external hard drives all Western Digital, 2 x 320gb Passport and 1 x 1tb Elements. I labelled the hard drives as the computer named them when I first installed them (E&F). Since then LR calls them whatever it wants when I plug them in so there are always question marks beside my photos as LR thinks I have plugged a different hard drive in.
Although I only have 1 x 1tb WD Elements hard drive LR calls it something different if I disconnect it and reconnect it so it then starts trying to find all my photos again.
My partner doesn't have these problems as he never unplugs his hard drives but I need to as sometimes I work on a laptop with the same LR catalogue, if I am working away, so I take a hard drive with me with the relevant images on.
I could do with:
a) a way of naming my WD hard drives so LR recognises which are plugged in
b) a very straightforward digital workflow - I have many LR books but need a LR genius to say 1) do this 2) do that etc. - I have approx 30,000 images and even without the hard drive problems am getting a bit bogged down trying to be organised - I'm a photographer not an administrator and am really bad at the organisational side.
Help, please, I'm drowning in technology - ps I love Lightroom!

Then the issue is most likely WIndows XP. When one attaches a remote drive, Windows XP can arbitrarily assign it to any one of the drive letter assignments, D: through Z:. A: and B: are reserved for diskette drives, and C: is typically assiged to the boot drive where Windows XP resides.
The drive letters change typically when one plugs in the external drives in different order. So if you have DriveA and DriveB, and you plug in DriveA then DriveB, then DriveA may get assigned D: and DriveB may get assigned E:. If, however, one plugs in DriveB first then DriveA, the order will probably get reversed, in which case Lightroom will lose track of all the photo which it had previously found in location D: and E:.
The solution is to use windows disk management to force the assignment of the drive letters. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307844 for details. Assign the letters that Lightroom uses.
A problem you may run into is if you attach a new drive then attach your photo drives. I believe that Windows will give the new drive the D; slot, since it is unused, but then randomly assign the photo drive because it's defined location is unavailable. Windows is a poor manager of such things, Apple is not.
The solution is to always attach drives in the same order, and Windows will assign the drive correctly, assume one has performed the tasks in the article.
Another approach is to use the Windows mount command. If you're brave, see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/205524.
John

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