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Losing drive letters (XP Home)


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#1
johngie

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:whistling: I have a USB connected drive to which I had assigned drive letter F. For some reason now, each time I plug it in, the drive letter increments by one (F to G and so on) and I cannot reassign any drive letter it has used before: in other words when I go to disk management the only letters available are those above the last letter it used. I have never encountered this before.

This morning I installed a Linksys router connected to an ethernet port on the PC. The router works fine - I can hardly believe this is the cause. There is no network drive as such and no other computer is connected to the router.

This is getting desperate, since I plug in a card reader too and it's having the same effect - I will actually run out of drive letters soon.
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#2
Vaillant

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Well if they're not currently used, you won't "run out", your windows just thinks it is. We need to reset your drive letters. Let's start by trying this.

start>run>regedit

now, surf in the left pane up this tree:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/MountedDevices

Right click on that lil folder, export it to the desktop. This is our backup safetey, if windows reacts badly we can restore the value, and no damage is done, although there shouldn't be any problems here.

Now, delete this lil folder. So that the MountedDevices folder is gone. Then, reboot.

This, in effect, resets window's knowledge of drive lettering, forces it to detect and re-assign new drive letters. Your main drives should stay the same, if you didn't set them to special letters in the first place. Now, put in that USB drive, and see what letter it's given. It should, in theory, return to that F: like you want it. Put it in, take it out a few times, see if it stays at that F:, or if it increments again.

Report back what happens once you're ready.

Alright :whistling:
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#3
johngie

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Thanks very much for the help. If you're a "geek in training", geeks must be good :whistling:

I've looked at the registry key; towards the bottom is a list of drives shown as

\DOSDevices\ followed by the drive letter and then by a lot of hex code.

Significantly the drive letters show the expected A-E and then F, H, J and K. This looks significant, but I haven't had the courage (yet!) to alter of delete this.

When I reboot the PC, I get the missing letters back but Windows "hogs" them again until the next reboot.

I just thought you might like to ponder the above before I take the plunge!

Once again, many thanks for your help.

Regards

Johngie
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#4
Vaillant

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Seeing how everytime you connect or disconnect a drive, something here gets altered, leaves a trace, what you describe doesn't concern me, honestly. I believe my approach should fix the problem, scince it has for me in the past.
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