Windows 10: Windows 10 will not assign a drive letter when connecting a USB Drive (will not release the...

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

:)

 

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.

 

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

maybe your USB drive is trying to assign a drive letter that is already taken.

goto

start > control panel > administrative tools > computer manager > disk manager

find your USB drive and assign is a drive letter

 

USB drive letter assignments

Long-winded background:

I have a USB flash drive that I assigned to drive D: in Disk Management. Occasionally when I'm not thinking, I plug it in when another external drive is connected and already assigned D: by Windows. The flash drive then gets reassigned as E:. I know I
can switch it back to D: in Disk Management, but frankly my original reason for assigning a fixed letter is not such a big deal anymore. Is there a way to "undo" fixed letter assignments? I'd like to just let the drive float again.

TL;DR:

Once you assign a fixed drive letter in Disk Management, is there a way to "undo" and let the drive assignment float again?