Windows 10: ramdom local disk drive thats a Fat32 partition that also has drive letter under drive letter Z

i have just noticed this today that under my devices and drives i have another storage device or a partition on there that's about 60 mbs of storage on there which i thought was strange? so i went in to diskpart in cmd and i removed the drive letter manually through there. after that it was fine it didn't show up again in devices and drives until i shut my PC down for the night and in the morning i started my PC up and i noticed it was there again! is there a fix to get rid of this once and for all its super annoying to see this!

:)

 

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

 

mysterious local drive z:

I also have a mysterious drive z: (Local Disk). I never saw this UNTIL I started trying to map a local share of OpenCV libs to a drive letter...in this case z. The first time this happened I deleted the share and the z drive seemed to disappear on its own.
Stubbornly, I tried to reestablish it again, mapping my local share to drive z. Once again, after a few days, the share turned into a local disk with no permission to access or disconnect the mapping.

Is it legal to try and map a local share to a drive letter or, like in other posts, is this windows taking over drive z for its own uses????? Again, I never saw this until I started trying to map a local share to drive z.

 

Reformatting - Wrong Drive Letters?

Where is this at? All i see is the options for the partitions but nothing about switching the drive letters