Numerous drive letters appeared and occupied

Disk management


As shown in the picture, sorry for the Chinese language.

I have only 1 HDD, and it had only been seperated into 2 active Windows partitions, with 2 hidden partitions.

C: for system, D: for normal storage, Z: used to be hidden as the OEM partition but now it appears, another hidden for Dell system recovery.



Normally it should only show 2 partitions, C: and D:
E~I being used for DVD drives and virtual drives.

But now everything from J: till Y: appeared which I never use them before.

Whenever I plug in as USB or external HDD, nothing show up in My Computer.

I try to assign them to a drive letter in disk management, it tells that the drive letter had been occupied by other drives, asking if I still want to assign it.

I pressed yes, and it did show up in My Computer, but when I double click on it, it tells that the disk had not been formatted, asking to format.

The USB or HDD is for sure well formatted for Windows.
This phenomenon can be temporarily fixed right after reboot and boot up, and the USB or HDD can be read as normal.

But after a while, all the other drive letter from J to Y show up again, and the phenomenon happened.

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Another problem is that in the disk management, the partition (102MB) marked red for OEM has no drive letter, which is normal



but in My Computer, it appeared as drive letter Z: and everything inside become accessible.



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Hope I explained the condition well and someone can help me out.

Sorry for the crappy English and the system language.

If any information need, I can add up and explain them.

Thanks.

AddRAM said:

That is crazy

Did this recently start ?

Do you want to try a system restore ?

This happed after I tried to use a Windows fix, pressing F8 on boot up.

Before this, sometimes the drive letter Y: appears, which gain access of the Recovery partition, but only Y: appears, not anything else.

Not planning for a system restore. Currently I have no hard drive to backup all my stuff and settings.

Layback Bear said:

I think what AddRAM is referring to is this.

By Brink:

System Restore

It had been disabled, and there's no backup

AddRAM said:

You should have never disabled system restore If you never created a disk image, that was very foolish.

You do not have to have another hard drive to create a system image, you can always create another partition for backup purposes as a last resort :)

Worse come to worse I would do the built-in recovery of OEM, so I disabled it.

AddRAM said:

So if you can`t fix the issue it looks like that`s what you`ll be using.

Something has created all those phantom drives, you`re just going to have to work on deleting them all.

By the way, you really should add some space from D to C.

And why do you think you need another drive for storage, you have 581 GBs right there on your hard drive for storage, do not store any data on C, once you get this figured out, please turn system restore back on.

You should have also had a disk image stored on D.

But it looks like you only have 5% free space on D, you need to work on deleting un needed data off there.

Some Windows update had been installed 1 or 2 days before and after that BSOD.