Windows 7 x64 Quit Assigning Drive Letters Automatically... ??

Alright, so my Windows 7 recently quit assigning drive letters automatically. I frequently plug in new hard drives to the system using various USB to IDE or SATA adapters and now when I plug in a new hard drive with any of these USB adapters, it does not get a drive letter assigned to the volumes on the drive. If I go to Disk Management, the drives show up, and so do their partitions, and I can manually assign a drive letter to it, but this gets rather tedious. Any idea why it quit doing it automatically and how to get it to automatically assign drive letters once again?? I figured maybe it ran out of letters, so I went in the registry to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices and deleted all the remembered drive letter assignments in there, but that didn't help any. Any clues???

Must go into disk management and initialize the drive.

spyknee said:

Must go into disk management and initialize the drive.

Thats not the problem. All the drives I plug in have already been initialized on other systems and currently have valid windows partitions on them with data. If I simply right click on the partition in Disk Management and choose "Change drive letter" and then manually assign the drive a letter it works fine.. but this is a huge hassle as I plug in several different drives a day. Windows should, and always has just automatically assigned a drive letter to all valid partitions upon the drive being plugged into the system. Now it does not, something is wrong.

I had this problem too. The following solved it for me.

Open up a command prompt.
Type the following:
diskpart <enter>
automount enable <enter>

Good luck.

JC6 said:

I had this problem too. The following solved it for me.

Open up a command prompt.
Type the following:
diskpart <enter>
automount enable <enter>

Good luck.

I've been struggling with this same problem (RAID1 which I have to manually assign a drive letter to each and every time I reboot; Win7 Pro 64bit)

I typed the following above and didn't have any luck. I'm wondering if it really pertains to what I'm trying to do.

My RAID1 is always connected and I never plan on disconnecting it. Its (2) SATA drives running as a RAID1.

Any other suggestions?

TIA

Been a few days... Anyone have any suggestions? Maybe I should create a new thread that is more specific?

this works but you have to do it from an evelated command prompt

IamHandyAndy said:

this works but you have to do it from an evelated command prompt

Which is considered to be done by running it as an administrator right? (right click > run as an administrator)

I thought if it required elevation, it would prompted me to do so? I don't remember it ever prompting me to do so?