Windows 7 Windows 7 x64 Quit Assigning Drive Letters Automatically... ??

[thepunkerguy]

Alright, so my Windows 7 recently quit assigning drive letters automatically. I frequently plug in new hard drives to the system using various USB to IDE or SATA adapters and now when I plug in a new hard drive with any of these USB adapters, it does not get a drive letter assigned to the volumes on the drive. If I go to Disk Management, the drives show up, and so do their partitions, and I can manually assign a drive letter to it, but this gets rather tedious. Any idea why it quit doing it automatically and how to get it to automatically assign drive letters once again?? I figured maybe it ran out of letters, so I went in the registry to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices and deleted all the remembered drive letter assignments in there, but that didn't help any. Any clues???

 

[Captain Jack]

Hello and Welcome !!

Do you have any network drives mapped right behind your existing CD or DVD?, (ie: if CD drive is drive F, network map using drive G) If so Remap the network drive to further down the alphabet. If you have a Virtual Drive uninstall it and see if that makes any difference.

Good Luck,
Captain

 

[thepunkerguy]

Hello and Welcome !!

Do you have any network drives mapped right behind your existing CD or DVD?, (ie: if CD drive is drive F, network map using drive G) If so Remap the network drive to further down the alphabet. If you have a Virtual Drive uninstall it and see if that makes any difference.

Good Luck,
Captain

I have no network drives mapped at all. I also uninstalled any programs that had virtual drives, still no luck :-(

 

[Captain Jack]

Well, In that case the only fix it can think of would be to Repair your OS Repair Install - Windows 7 Forums

- Captain

 

[Saltgrass]

I can't really think of a solution either, but if you have been using virtual drives, that might be related.

Do you have any partitions mounted through a folder in another partition?

How are you disconnecting the drive prior to reconnecting at a later time? Are you using these drives on another computer?

You might check Safe Mode and device manager to see if any ghosts devices are showing up for drives. This was a situation in XP but I have really not noticed it occurring in Win 7.