Solved Drive showing in My Computer but not in Disk Managment

[holydevil]

I have a System Reserved drive showing up in My Computer, but it isn't showing up in Disk Management so that I can remove the drive letter from it. Screenshots are attached.

Any help removing this rouge drive letter will be greatly appreciated!

 

[Brink]

Hello holydevil,

You might see if you may be able to remove the drive letter using OPTION TWO in the tutorial below, and deleting the \DosDevices\I: Binary value.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/82994-drive-letter-add-change-remove-windows.html

Hope this helps,
Shawn

 

[holydevil]

Hello holydevil,

You might see if you may be able to remove the drive letter using OPTION TWO in the tutorial below, and deleting the \DosDevices\I: Binary value.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/82994-drive-letter-add-change-remove-windows-7-a.html

Hope this helps,
Shawn

That looked very promising, but alas, drive letter "I" is not in the registry there.

 

[Brink]

Odd. Does it still show after restarting the PC?

If so, then you might see if adding a drive letter to the "System Reserved" partition in Disk Management, then removing the drive letter may toggle it to not show in Computer anymore.

I also noticed that the two dynamic partitions on Disk 1 have the same drive letter D: . Are these spanned volumes? If so, then nothing to worry about. Personally, I think it would be better for it to be a basic disk instead of dynamic.

 

[mjf]

In addition to Disk 1 being dynamic you appear to have pagefiles on it. I think the pagefile is best on your Disk 0 OS partition. Brink may comment further and on his tutorial
Virtual Memory Paging File - Change
I'm guessing Disk 0 is an SSD and disk 1 is your old HDD OS disk ????

 

[Brink]

In addition to Disk 1 being dynamic you appear to have pagefiles on it. I think the pagefile is best on your Disk 0 OS partition. Brink may comment further and on his tutorial
Virtual Memory Paging File - Change
I'm guessing Disk 0 is an SSD and disk 1 is your old HDD OS disk ????

 

[holydevil]

Odd. Does it still show after restarting the PC?

If so, then you might see if adding a drive letter to the "System Reserved" partition in Disk Management, then removing the drive letter may toggle it to not show in Computer anymore.

I also noticed that the two dynamic partitions on Disk 1 have the same drive letter D: . Are these spanned volumes? If so, then nothing to worry about. Personally, I think it would be better for it to be a basic disk instead of dynamic.

I tried setting system reserved to I and setting it back to nothing before making the thread. No dice. Also it has persisted through the two or thee reboots I've done in the last few weeks.

It turned into dynamic when I extended it, but it isn't related to that being dynamic because I only changed that a day ago when messing with stuff, which I wish I hadn't done. I'll just have to deal with that and make it "normal" when I get a chance to copy data off that drive. Here's hoping that reformatting that disk and getting rid of the extra 100 MB thing gets rid of the I drive, although I don't see any reason for it to since it's not set to I.

In addition to Disk 1 being dynamic you appear to have pagefiles on it. I think the pagefile is best on your Disk 0 OS partition. Brink may comment further and on his tutorial
Virtual Memory Paging File - Change
I'm guessing Disk 0 is an SSD and disk 1 is your old HDD OS disk ????

My pagefile is 16 GB because I have 16 GB of ram, so it would take up way too much space on the SSD. I could probably just delete the page file though since 16 GB would be way more than enough for what I do on that computer.

Yes, Disk 0 is the OS disk and Disk 1 used to have Windows 7 on it, and when I formatted it I forgot to delete the 100 MB partition and just formatted the larger one.

 

[whs]

A 1GB pagefile will suffice and should be on C.

 

[Prof Kerfuffle]

Have you tried this as a solution?

Hide physical drives in Windows Explorer

Really it's for XP but works on Vista and thusly it should work on 7.

Here is the link to demonstrate it on Vista http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/hide-drives-from-your-computer-in-windows-vista/

If it works it isn't as complete of a solution as removing the drive letter but hopefully it will hide it from explorer. It's a wildshot but could work.

 

[Brink]

Hmm, ok holydevil.

Lets see if you are able to remove the drive letter using step 7 in OPTION THREE of the tutorial below in the command prompt.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/82994-drive-letter-add-change-remove-windows.html

 

[whs]

7. To Remove a Drive Letter

A) In the command prompt, type remove letter=letter and press Enter. (see screenshot below)
​

Little problem Shawn - there is no screenshot below - only above.

 

[Brink]

Removed.

 

[mjf]

Sooner or later you should convert disk 1 to BASIC.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/26829-convert-dynamic-disk-basic-disk.html
I'd go for option 1 but backup critical data from disk 1 first.
Alternatively backup your disk 1 data and use the other option of formatting disk 1.
A small pagefile on your OS partition (disk 0 partition 2) is all you need with an SSD as WHS has indicated.
Again see the tutorial for pagefile management
http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/132201-virtual-memory-paging-file-change.html

 

[holydevil]

I have figured out that the drive causing the problem is the System Reserved on Disk 0. If I set it to another drive letter such as "G", the "I" drive goes away, but when I remove the drive letter I set, the "I" drive comes back. I tried option 3 on Brink's tutorial. I got an error saying "Virtual Disk Service error: The path is not found."

If I delete the partition after backing it up, then recreate it and restore the files, will that mess up Windows' ability to use that should it ever need to?

Also as for the pagefile and the oddly formatted drive, I removed the pagefile completely, and am in progress backing up data off that drive to reformat it properly. I will add the pagefile in the future if I ever need to but I've never had a problem with 16 or 32GB of ram and no page file on other computers.

At the moment, the "I" drive is not showing in My Computer. Sometimes it goes away for an hour or two but it has always come back.

Have you tried this as a solution?

Hide physical drives in Windows Explorer

Really it's for XP but works on Vista and thusly it should work on 7.

Here is the link to demonstrate it on Vista Hide Drives from Your Computer in Windows 7 or Vista

If it works it isn't as complete of a solution as removing the drive letter but hopefully it will hide it from explorer. It's a wildshot but could work.

I'd do that, but it would only be a band-aid that will come to bite me later if I try to set something as the "I" drive and forget I set that.

 

[Brink]

No. You really don't want to delete or mess with the "System Reserved" partition like that. Doing so could make your Windows unbootable, and will be a real pain to sort out.

When using Option Three, does it show the I: letter after "list volume"? If not, then that would be why you got the error. If you haven't already, try Option Three when the I: letter is showing in your My Computer window to see if it may also show in the command prompt to hopefully be able to remove it.

 

[holydevil]

No. You really don't want to delete or mess with the "System Reserved" partition like that. Doing so could make your Windows unbootable, and will be a real pain to sort out.

When using Option Three, does it show the I: letter after "list volume"? If not, then that would be why you got the error. If you haven't already, try Option Three when the I: letter is showing in your My Computer window to see if it may also show in the command prompt to hopefully be able to remove it.

I'm just gonna go ahead and delete the partition to have this problem over with because I've done it a few times in the past and no issues have shown up from doing that. I just wanted to see if I could get the I: drive thing fixed without having to delete the partition.

And pain to sort out doesn't apply to me
I reinstall windows every few months just because anyway, and horribly messing up my system would just give me a good reason to do it again.

No, it didn't show that drive when I used list volume.

 

[Brink]

Ah, good. Yeah, I'm usually having to reinstall every few months as well with all the tinkering I do.

 

[whs]

Hmm, aren't you guys using images. And for tinkering, a VMware virtual partition is preferable. The VMware folder is easy to copy for backup.

 

[Brink]

Oh, yes. I use images, but it usually only takes me about 20 minutes for a full clean install of Windows 8.1 and getting it fully setup. I'm getting to where I can do it in my sleep now. LOL

I usually use VMs for most tinkering, but some things can only be tested on the main installation.

 

[whs]

WOW, 20 minutes for an installation. It takes me a day to process the 360 updates - for Windows 7. But I guess in Windows 8.1 there are not so many yet.

Last summer I reinstalled a Vista system on my wife's laptop in Germany. That was really fun. The recovery partition was from March 2007 without SP1, SP2 and all the other updates. Then she had Office from about the same time. And she also uses AOL which is a major installation if you want to have the real thing - not the browser version.