CLEO - Welcome To The Darkside!

[Cleo]

I don't have drives showing on my desktop but double clicking on the drive icon should give you a window with whatever the last view was. So if the last time you viewed this in column view then it should always give you column view and not an icon view.

Command N for a new Finder window when you are in the Finder. (Or just about any program)

Also windows should remember their location, size, and view. If they aren't then you need to repair disk permissions. Use Disk Utility that can be found in your Utilities folder that is in your Applications folder.

Basically the Mac stores each Finder windows preferences in its invisible .DS_Store file and sometimes things get screwy if you don't have read/write permissions for this file.

Also run this in Terminal. (Terminal can also be found in your Utilities folder.)
sudo find . -name .DS_Store -print -exec chmod 777 {} \;

I've found the above command does wonders for getting the Finder to always remember window settings but haven't needed to run it in a very long time.