Windows 10: i had a extra drive connect to my pc, i forgot the assigned drive letters, remove now but...

I need to find a delete old drive letter mappings I used at one time before upgrading my internal drive, I found one old mapping for a "h" drive all in registry, I have forgotten at least 2 other external drive mappings, I figured it might be in the log files but just don't know where or what to search for.

:)

 

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.

 

Drive letters are not available for assigning to unallocated space

Hello Sjoerd,



Thank you for writing to Microsoft Community Forums.



The reason the drive letters are not available to assign are because they might have been assigned to devices which are removed or hidden. I suggest you to check for any hidden devices and remove them to assign the missing drive letters.



Follow the steps mentioned below to check for the hidden or removed devices.

1. Press Windows key + R. This will open
   Run. Alternatively, you can go to Start and search for Run.
   
2. In Run dialog box, type
   devmgmt.msc and hit enter.
   
3. Click on the view tab at the top left hand corner.
   
4. Now select View hidden devices.
   
5. Now look for the hidden devices under storage volumes and
   portable devices.
   
6. Right click on the hidden devices and click on
   uninstall.
   
7. Restart the PC.
   

After restarting the PC, try assigning the drive letter to the unallocated drive and check if the drive letters D, E, F, G, and H appears.



Hope it helps.



Regards,

Prakhar Khare

Microsoft Community – Moderator

 

Windows 10 will not assign a drive letter when connecting a USB Drive (will not release the drive letter when disconnecting as well)

Hi,

I have a very strange problem. I just purchased a new Western Digital My Passport 2 TB USB drive. I have formatted the drive in Fat32 (Required for my device).

1. When I connect the drive the Disk Management application sees the drive but no Driver letter is assigned.
2. Disk Management reports the drive as a Healthy Active Primary partition.
3. I right click on the drive and assign a drive letter which works as expected. I can now access the drive via file explorer and read and write files.
4. If I disconnect the drive, the drive letter remains visible in explorer and changes to "Local Disk"
5. If I reconnect the drive once again a drive letter is not assigned (original drive letter remains listed as "Local Disk" and is inaccessible).
6. I can reassign another drive letter as I did in step 3 above and the issue repeats over and over. Of course each time I have less and less drive letters available to me since the assigned letters never release.
7. In order to reclaim the drive letters I have to reboot (after disabling fast startup in power options, so hardware is re-initialized during reboot). Once reboot is complete all the "Local Disks" created during this process are removed and the drive letters
   are once again available for assignment.
8. This process repeats over and over

Other Observations:

1. I have another 4TB Western Digital My Passport Ultra drive (formatted in Fat32), that does NOT exhibit this behavior. It works normally
2. The problematic drive works fine when connecting to my Mac.
3. All other USB drives and sticks I own do NOT exhibit this behavior.
4. I confirmed in Diskpart that Automatic mounting of new volumes is enable
5. I contacted Western Digital and after working with them for a while their assessment was since the drive works when a drive letter is manually assigned and works fine in a Mac the drive is fine, they suspect this is an issue with Windows 10.
6. As a test I also reformatted the drive using NTFS and the issue still happens

Any assistance is appreciated