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Windows 7 loses its drive letters and I have to keep manually assigning a drive letter everytime I plug in a hard drive, whether it's internal or external.

The only way to get around it is to reinstall Windows 7 but the problem will come back after a few months. We are a PC repair company and plug in many drives during the say and it can be very frustrating having to keep assigning a drive letter every time a drive is plugged in. Windows Updates are turned off so it can't be that.

Any reason why this would have happened?

deanpcmad
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  • Related: [How to force a drive letter for a USB drive](http://superuser.com/questions/197970/how-to-force-a-drive-letter-for-a-usb-drive) – Sathyajith Bhat Dec 17 '10 at 16:41

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I think it probably had to do with the windows saving different drive letters for different drives into its registry. The registry keys are: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices

I guess if you delete the unused entries it may help... but you may as well ruin the system and need a reinstall if you somehow messed up with it..

so there you go...

bubu
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  • Thanks for that. Do you know how to find out what the volume id of the current drives installed are so that I do not remove the wrong ones? http://img.ly/images/629138/full – deanpcmad Dec 17 '10 at 12:03
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    c:\> mountvol [enter] – bubu Dec 17 '10 at 12:08
  • may i stress once more that it is very dangerous stuff to edit. remember to at least make a restore point/backup beforehand – bubu Dec 17 '10 at 12:09
  • OK thanks. Just doing an image before I change anything – deanpcmad Dec 17 '10 at 12:18
  • Also read @harrymc's link.. it's a good read – bubu Dec 17 '10 at 12:28
  • Hi again. Nope it's still doing the same thing. Grr. Any other suggestions? – deanpcmad Dec 17 '10 at 15:53
  • Sorry, i think that's what i could think of at the moment... let me think for a while and come back... – bubu Dec 17 '10 at 16:05
  • @bubu your comment is a partial answer and you should submit it as such. I did the following: removed my USB drive; mountvol /R; mountvol /E; inserted my USB drive -- got the typical pop-up to choose what to do (e.g., open in Explorer) – mobibob Aug 25 '13 at 16:32
  • This fixed my issue, there were a bunch of junk entries in the registry. – Weston Aug 08 '14 at 21:48
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I'm using CCleaner to keep my registry all nice and tidy, and as a result, it seems to be wiping the drive letter assignment registry items. While this isn't a solution per se, it seems to me that you may be running into something similar since you're a repair shop and may be trying to keep your test systems squeaky with a daily scheduled registry sweep which could be causing the issue.

Tom Auger
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It may be that since you are plugging-in so many disks, Windows runs out of drive letters.

When that happens, you can assign the drive letter manually from Computer Management / Disk Management.

If you would like to make Windows forget all drive letter assignments, read this carefully:
Change or Delete System Drive Letter via Registry to Remove Conflict.

harrymc
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From Microsoft forum:

DOS run diskpart. Sure enough, the volume was perfectly ok, but the "hidden" attribute was set. So a quick

LIST VOLIUME

SELECT VOLUME n

ATTRIBUTES VOLUME CLEAR HIDDEN

EXIT
Community
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Brian
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