Windows 10: External HDD always losing drive letter

I have a Laptop
Thus i cant install my HDD's anymore, and i bought an external Dock.
The Dock is working fine, comes with some usb§ connections and such, all good for a while

But now after a year it starts to just "forget" the letter of one of the two HDD's. In my Drive Dock i got a small paltter with 1TB, A:
and the other is my 4TB platter, Z:

And every 2 days or so windows just forgets Z:
i tried to do alot, checked the attributes, checked services, renamed from Volume to Storage, i just cant get it to stay and need to always go into the disk management and give it the letter Z again.

Im so annyoed by it you couldnt believe.
Is there a solution to this or can i put this away as "ultimate unfixable bug" like so much else in windows? (for example a thunderbolt 3 connector that cant put out a hdmi signal anymore after a driver update)

submitted by /u/ANdrasVanFloof
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:)

 

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.

 

how to stop windows from changing the letter of my USB external HDD

Hi Bvella,

Thank you for posting your query in Microsoft Community.

I understand the inconvenience you are facing currently.

I would appreciate if you can provide us the following information to help us understand the issue better.

• Since when are you facing this issue?
• Did you make any changes in prior to this issue?

I would like to inform you that the issue might have occurred due to some changes made to your computer.

I suggest you to try changing the drive letter of the drive and check if it helps.

Follow the steps to change the drive letter:

• Press Windows + X keys and click on Disk Management.
• Right click on the external drive and click on Change Drive letter and paths.
• Click on Change the button.
• Under Assign the following Drive letter, select the desired drive letter.
• Click Ok to save changes.

Hope the information helps. Please let us know if the issue persist and we will be happy to assist you further.

 

WD external drive letter change

Hi @WilliamSlessor!

I'm sorry to hear about the confusion with the external drive. What I would suggest is to go in Disk Management and try to reassign the letters on both drives with a third one, and then go back to the original letters. For instance - change the G:G: drive to
M:, and then reassign it as G: again.

You can follow the steps described in this KB article:

http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=T1tsut

Hope this helps and let us know how it went.