Resolved Incomplete loading of available drives

Well, at least often. At startup, bios reports detecting all ide drives, but often the internal ide optical, and external firewire optical drives, and the drives on my usb card reader are not available via explorer. It is about a 3 out of 4 times out of each boot. This problem has been getting worse over the last four months or so.

 

Since this is an intermittent problem, it will be hard to pinpoint without lots of patience and trial and error.

Have you tried assigning different drive letters to the external drives such as X, Y, or Z, so that they will be far removed from the internal drive letters?

Have you tried uninstalling all usb controllers listed in Device Manager and letting Windows re-detect them?

That's just a couple of shots in the dark but we have to start somewhere.

Try creating another user profile and log into it and set a bare minimum of auto-startups. Test that to see if the problem exists there so as to possibly discover that some startup program is causing this issue.

This has all the trappings of a flaky piece of hardware so disconnecting external drives one at a time and testing may show something. Perhaps a bad cable or connector...

 

I agree, you should give drive letters to the external drives in Disk Management, rather than letting them be allocated during startup. If they are allocated at startup, they can clash.

 

FIXED I tried so many things like reassigning drive letters, removing external drives, playing with startup programs, all to no avail. Finally I looked at my anti-virus, and firewall. I use Avast anti-virus and found there was an option to have it load last. That cured the problem about half the time. Then I looked in to my COMODO firewall. I found that there were almost a hundred items that it found suspicious, and apparently stopped to scan every time. They were various .dlls. There is an option to send the report in for verification of each item, and apparently they were all legitimate. Now it no longer scans for them, and my windows startup goes faster and I have all my drives back all the time.

 

Thanks for letting us know.

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