Reassigning hard drive letters

Are the drives internal or USB/eSATA external drives? Windows 7 generally will not assign a drive letter on external drives in a lot of cases but once the user assigns a drive letter it should remain as the default. If the drive letter assigned is right when you boot into SAFE Mode then it may be some sort of software interference. You may want to review the Microsoft KB Article to see if it references your issue http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929135

fishnbanjo said:

Windows 7 generally will not assign a drive letter on external drives in a lot of cases

Hi fishnbanjo,

Hmmm......Perhaps I'm missing what you're saying because Windows will assign drive letters to external drives. In fact I hadn't seen where it didn't happen, unless there was a problem.

I just now hooked up a thumb drive, an external hard drive, and WD Passport Drive. All the drive letters were automatically assigned by Windows.




@ bigonroad,

Did you "manually" assign any drive letters?

Also, do this, try assigning a drive letter to just the "Photo" drive and see if it will stick. Let us know.

It should be assigning letters on its own, but i always thought Windows wanted them in certain order.
Meaning, the 1st partition of each drive gets 1st letter then moving to second partition on each drive assigning alphabetcally.

Such as :
Disk 0: P1(C) P2(E) P3 (G)
Disk 1: P1(D) P2(F)
CD ROM: (H) Or whatever letter you desire

I'm not certain this will make a difference, so please correct me if wrong.

This may not even be the cause, Just a thought.

whs I noticed that as well. What I wanted him to try first was to see if he can assign a drive letter to his photo drive only. If he could, than the problem is not the hard drive but maybe the partitions. And if the music drive is the MBR he can't assign any other letter than what was assigned. Unfortunately he doesn't know what letter that was because it's blank.

That's my shot in the dark anyway.

But.... I had a different problem where I wanted to move my MBR from my "Games" drive to the "C" drive and SIW2 gave me a fix to do it. I think the OP should try and move the MBR first using SIW2's fix than see if he can assign drive letters.

Again, my shot in the dark.

Here's the post - Boot loader on separate partition?

I guess we won't know until he posts back.

Boot into 7 - don't assign any letters.

In regedit , go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices

click on mounted devices and see what is listed under Dos devices in the right pane ( post a screenie )

bigonroad said:

My problem: My computer keeps failing to assign letters to two partitions. I can set it up fine in diskmgmt.msc, but as soon as I restart, it loses them again.


My setup: I have 2 hard disks.

• Hard disk 1 has 3 partitions.
• Hard disk 2 has 2 partitions.

However, the hard disk 2 partitions are not labelled or assigned a number automatically by windows. I can assign them one, but it resets when I restart the computer!

Background: I'm running Windows 7, which I installed yesterday. I've never had a problem like this before. Once assigned a letter, all the files are intact and accessible on the missing partitions.

An Image: Check the image below to see my setup in visual terms:



Any help would be much appreciated!
Bless,
Chris