Re claiming old USB drive letters

During some swaps of usb drives and the occasional hickup which seems to assign a new drive letter to a usb pen or hard drive i have used several of the drive letters available, is there anyway i can reclaim some of these disused drive letters as they are no longer offered for selection in the disk management menus for changing drive letters.

any help would be welcome

 

"Ocassional hiccup"

Only a "try ", but look at uninstalling the drives in Device Manager and starting over. You may have to connect the drives for them to appear in DM or try looking in Device Manager in Safe Mode.

Let us know if this helps. I would be interested to know myself.

Luck
Matt

 

Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices in the registry. If you are running XP and it is assigned as the C drive you can happily delete all entries, on reboot XP will reassign letters to all connected drives in the same manner as Win9x does. You can even delete the entire MountedDevices folder and it will be recreated on reboot. NOTE: if your XP install is any other drive letter than C then you will kill XP. If you have a dual/multiboot system using the Windows bootmanager then you need to be sure that XP is indeed the C drive. If in any doubt don’t proceed.

If you are running 2K then there are other variables to consider and I would NOT recommend trying this.

If you have previously altered drive letters from the XP default then you will have to alter them again. If you have moved the pagefile to another partition or set up a second pagefile you may have to reset them.

You can if you want delete individual drive letter entries and their corresponding Volume entry, which is a way of getting round things if XP is not the C drive, but you need to be sure of what you are doing. If XP is C then it is really much easier just to delete everything and reorder drive letters if needed with Disk management.

Just let me emphasize again that getting it all wrong could make Windows unbootable. If you have no way of restoring the registry or restoring an image of the OS then the only way to recover would be by remote editing of the registry.

 

Many thanks McTavish it seems to have worked a treat,
Can you suggest what might be causing the problems with the USB external drives changing drive letters it seems to be a recent problem

 

Sorry Alboy, don’t know XP’s criteria for assigning drive letters to various USB devices, I just know it’s all stored in MountedDevices and things can become confused when the list gets very long after several different devices or various partitions have come and gone. XP remembers everything it has ever seen, so clearing out the list every now and again wipes its memory and usually clears up problems.

 

Always use 'Safely Removing Hardware' method.
1 drive in particular seems to be a problem it is either not recognised or takes ages to appear in the list, I have tried a new port and lead but it still seems temperamental strange considering it is fairly new and is hardly used.

 

If you're running "Spyware Doctor" by "PC Tools Software ", uninstall it, reboot and see if that solves the problem.

 

There may be a problem with the USB controller drivers. These should be included with any updated chipset drivers that you will find at the website of the motherboard.

 

I think i may have found the problem, the USB socket in the back of the drive was loose i tightened it up and for the moment everything seems to be fine, hope it lasts

many thanks to all who took the trouble to reply

 

Spoke to soon the problem still persists
The drive light flashes on and off every few seconds and when i go to 'Safely Removing Hardware' it shows the drive and type but has not allocated a drive letter and if i try to stop it it just hangs.
I have never had any problems with any other of my other external drives.
Is it likely to be the drive or the caddy electronic interface ???

 

alboy, to investigate properly you will need to do some tests (troubleshooting). The information is a little too sketchy.

The flashing of the LED may mean a loose connection (maybe the drive keeps "disappearing" as far as Windows is concerned). Can you try other methods of connecting it, as in, connecting to other USB ports? Are you using a USB hub?

It works fine on other computers?

If it can be read you could try running Checkdisk on it (see Help and Support). Have you done a full format on it?

There should be a utility disk that came with it. This may have diagnostic utilities.

There may be a firmware update for it at the manufacturer's website (only use a firmware update if the drive is running in a stable condition).

Matt
PS there may not be enough power to run it through that computer's USB system, in which case you would need to get a self-powered USB hub.

 

Hi mattman
Thanks for you interest

1. Drive is plugged directly into usb card at back of computer no hub
The drive light flashes when the drive is being read, I have tried other ports and get the same result.

2.Have tried it on my wife's laptop and it seems to work okay but then it is occasionally recognised on my PC straight away.

3. Have done a complete format on the drive no difference It is the only drive formatted in NTFS ( the only format option offered in windows format for this drive ) all my others are Fat32 would this make any difference ?

4. No utility disk supplied warehouse outlet no longer operating .

5. Not aware of any firmware update ( Maxtor 7 Y250P0 ) 250gb drive

6.It has it's own power supply

It shows up fairly quickly in 'Safely Removing Hardware' list complete with drive type but it does not have any drive letter allocated to it.

If i leave the drive running long enough 5 -10min or longer most times it eventually gets recognised and allocated a drive letter

I have tried other external drives and they appear okay.


hope this info helps