Windows 7 New Hard Drive Letter Dissapears After Every Reboot!

R

ravadox

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Mar 14, 2011
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I just recently purchased a 2TB WD20EARS Hard Drive and It is replacing another Hard Drive that Died. I Plugged it In, Everything seemed to be working fine. I Formatted it NTFS, Added Drive letter E to it (which was the same as the old drive its replacing). Copied all my data over to it and then noticed after every reboot of my computer the Drive will loose the E: Drive Letter. So to sum things up, After every reboot I have to go into Device Manager and Add E: to the hard drive so it shows up under my computer.. It Only does this in my Primary Computer. I plugged it into my HTPC and gave it a drive letter and everything worked fine, even after several reboots. Is it possible there is something in the registry causing the drive letter to be conflicting or something? I am on Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit btw. Any help would be greatly appreciated..
 
Solution
R
I SOLVED IT GUYS!!

there must have been something going on at the beginning or end of the drive. I ran the WD Zero Fill utility and wrote zeros to the first and last million bits of the drive and walla.. it started working correctly all of the sudden.. thanks for all your help
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It seems to be remembering the old drive on boot try a different letter. I don't know if there is a way to clear it or not.
Joe
 
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I tried changing it to R then rebooting, still got cleared. Tried X, still got cleared. Just for the heck of it I tried Uninstalling the driver for it and rebooting. It Installed fine and there was still no drive letter, even after it reinstalled drivers. Tried adding it again as Y:, rebooted.. same thing again.. This is crazy, I'm pulling what little hair out that i have.
 
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When you first boot up before you do anything, how does the drive appear in Disk Management?

Maybe a screen shot would help I.E.

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Mike
 
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it appears exactly the same as the SS, just without any drive letter. I right click on it and change drive letter and paths and there is nothing listed. i have to go to add then select the drive letter.. ive gone as far as trying almost every available drive letter and rebooting.. somethings goofed up.
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After a suggestion in another forum, I tried going into My computer and renaming the problem drive from Storage to Data.. I rebooted my system and the drive letter still went away.. Here is another SS of Disk Manager after the reboot.

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Hi again

If you have an old restore point I from before you changed the drive I would try that.
It would restore your registry to an earlier version.

Have you tried uninstalling the drive in Device Manager and then letting Windows detect it again?

Then I would run System File Scanner. From run type... "Scf /scannow" this will scan and restores system files. It's worth a shot.

This is a sort of trial and error approach but I don't know what's causing this.

Here's a couple of posts discussing the more or less the same issue you have.

Windows 7 won't recognize hard drive - Operating Systems

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If none of this helps I would do a repair install of Windows 7 to see if that will fix it.
It only takes about a half hour and seems like it should fix it if there is no mechanical issue.

Mike
 
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SFC /scannow finnished and didn't say anything after the verification.. so i guess it didn't find anything wrong? those 2 links didn't help me and the repair install didn't work either.. I think i am going to be stuck trying to reinstall windows 7.. thanks for the suggestions tho... this sucks :\
 
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I broke down and did a complete OS reload over the weekend.. The problem still exists.. Maybe there is some setting in the bios that is causing this? being a 2TB hard drive and all? My motherboard is a P5N32-E ELI. I tried updating to the latest revision, still no change.. any other help guys please?
 
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I SOLVED IT GUYS!!

there must have been something going on at the beginning or end of the drive. I ran the WD Zero Fill utility and wrote zeros to the first and last million bits of the drive and walla.. it started working correctly all of the sudden.. thanks for all your help
 
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Solution
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