Missing Volume Letter

An interesting problem I just ran into was a missing volume letter, yet the volume letter is being used and can be accessed.

I am using the "L" drive for a network share on multiple machines. This one machine shows the mapped drive in Windows Explorer, and you can access the contents of the drive. When you open a command window and type NET USE the "L" drive doesn't show up. Also if you go through Windows Explorer and click tools=>map network drive, and click the drop down to select the volume letter to use "L" is missing. When I know you should see L \\server\share all other network shares are listed but the one. This is also localized to this machine only. I have multiple machines that are identical and no other machine has this problem.

I ran tweak UI and the drive letter is not hidden. I checked multiple resources and all the fixes I've found haven't done anything.

Also this machine was imaged (7 machines with the same image) all imaged machines have new SID's.

Any help with this would be great help.

Let me know if you require more info.

 

Try net use * /delete to clear all the mappings on that machine and see if L shows up as available and the contents it was mapped to are no longer available.

If all is normal after that, remap and see how things are.

 

I did a NET USE * /DELETE still no go for L. I got an error when trying to map L. "System error 85 has occurred" "Local device name already in use ".

I checked drive managment and the drive letter isn't even available in there. **bang head on wall** I'm still looking for a fix but I might have to rebuild the machine, which I don't really want to do in order to fix the problem.

Thanks Newt for your help

Please post if you have had a similar problem and the fix you used.
All help is greatly appreciated.

 

Good article at http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/partsigs.htm about drive letters and the guts of your system.

You might want to poke around in the registry at
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\MountedDevices
to see if L is shown there. Not sure how safe it would be to make direct registry changes though. Might be fine but might blow things up. I really just don't know.

The same article should let you figure out if you've somehow hidden that partition.

 

It seems that I will be reimaging the machine as there is no L drive listed in the Reg key location.

Thanks for tracking down the info about the problem Newt. It seems that this was just a freak thing with Windows. (Like that doesn't happen)

 

Sorry we couldn't get it solved but I think a scrub & reload is probably your safest option when really bizarre, one-off things start happening.

 

I found a fix. It seems that it was because of a broken user profile.

Steps used to fix.

1. Cold boot login to the machine (locally not domain) admin account
2. Check for drive letter missing (magically its there)
3. Backup users profile that broke it (My docs, favs, PST file)
4. Delete the users profile (including the one on the server because Roaming)
5. Logout as local admin
6. Login as domain user (the one that broke the drive letter)
7. Let Windows recreate the profile
8. Check drive letters (Still all there)
9. Remap all network drives, and ensure they all work and show up under
NET USE
10. Logout and reboot
11. Login as the user double check the NET USE if all is well problem fixed

 

Wey Hey - good find. Gonna have to add that to my bag of tricks. I've seen corrupted profiles do some odd things but never before even heard of that one.

Thank you for posting back with the information.