Windows 10: Phantom Drive Letters

Discus and support Phantom Drive Letters in Windows 10 Drivers and Hardware to solve the problem; Ive read all the forum posts and tried using all the various diskpart methods but nothing works. I now have 6 phantom hard drives visible in File... Discussion in 'Windows 10 Drivers and Hardware' started by CharlesBlakemore, Sep 26, 2020.

  1. Phantom Drive Letters


    Ive read all the forum posts and tried using all the various diskpart methods but nothing works. I now have 6 phantom hard drives visible in File Explorer and I am out of drive letters to assign to new drives. They show up in File Explorer as Local Disks, assigned Drive Letters but each bearing a blue question mark. And when I try to open them, I’m told, ‘Location is not Available’. As Local Disks, they’re not network drives, and they are invisible, even after selecting ‘Show Hidden Files’ under Disk Management/View. How do I get these damned things out of my system?

    :)
     
    CharlesBlakemore, Sep 26, 2020
    #1
  2. Lazzer408 Win User

    help. USB drive isn't assigned a drive letter.

    Any usb flash drive I plug into my computer isn't assigned a drive letter. The physical drive shows in the "safely remove hardware" but it doesnt show up in disk management. I have tried to populate the volume thru the safely remove hardware properties window and it does pop up in the list but it doesn't stay there. This isn't a format or assign a letter problem. It's more complicated then that. Maybe one of the services needed for usb drive management was disabled? Suggestions needed. btw external usb harddrives work fine.
     
    Lazzer408, Sep 26, 2020
    #2
  3. jgt1942 Win User
    Phantom Drives on clean install


    I've been working on a Win10 clean install for a few weeks and this has been a huge uphill battle. Every day I seem to encounter some very weird issue and it takes me days/weeks to resolve. Tonight I just encountered several phantom drives.
    In the following image the drives F, J, K, H, L and I are what I think are phantom drives. When I formatted the drives as part of the drive label I include the actual drive letter, thus you can see that the phantom drives have forced some of my drives to a different drive letter than I originally assigned to it. I started the clean install just before the first of the year and tonight is the first time I've seen this issue. In the image in the bottom right corner is the properties of one of the phantom drives. I'm also attempting to restore the SSD boot drive to an earlier image but so far I cannot. I'm using Acronis True Image 2016, I boot into the recovery, start to drill down and find the .tib image, the keyboard and mouse stop responding and the only recourse is to reboot.
    Suggestions would be appreciated.

    Phantom Drive Letters [​IMG]
     
    jgt1942, Sep 26, 2020
    #3
  4. Bree Win User

    Phantom Drive Letters

    Phantom Hard Drive

    Yes, that's the System partition. As Samuria says, it should be hidden and not have a drive letter. Its seen as '100% free' and cannot be managed in Disk Management because it's a special protected system partition and you don't have the necessary permissions to read or change its properties.

    It has been reported before that occasionally the update from one version of Windows to the next (you got updated to 1803 on 24/5) can leave the System partition and/or the Recovery partition (which should also be hidden) with a drive letter it shouldn't have.

    To remove the drive letter, open a Command Prompt (Admin) type DISKPART then press the Enter key. At the DISKPART> prompt type the command...
    LIST VOLUME
    ...note the volume number of the System drive with the letter H. If, for example it's volume three type..
    SELECT VOLUME 3
    REMOVE LETTER=H

    You can now close the Diskpart window.


    Phantom Drive Letters [​IMG]
     
Thema:

Phantom Drive Letters

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