Solved Numerous drive letters appeared and occupied

[s9n60310a]

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]

That is crazy

Did this recently start ?

Do you want to try a system restore ?

 

[s9n60310a]

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]

I think what AddRAM is referring to is this.

By Brink:Tutorial

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/700-system-restore.html

 

[s9n60310a]

I think what AddRAM is referring to is this.

By Brink:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/700-system-restore.html

It had been disabled, and there's no backup

 

[AddRAM]

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

 

[s9n60310a]

The reason I use the F8 fix is that I encounter a BSOD that shows "bad system config info".
The fix didn't work
So I found a tutor said to go in command and type
"bcdedit /deletevalue {default} truncate memory"
"bcdedit/deletevalue {default} numproc"

but it still failed.

Then I remebered that before reboot, I adjusted msconfig, and had seen the max ram been set to 0
I don't know why, but I though it is something defualt.

That is the cause of BSOD, so I entered safe mode and adjust msconfig back to normal, then it fixed from BSOD.

 

[s9n60310a]

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]

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.

 

[s9n60310a]

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.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Have you installed any new hardware recently, such as an internal card reader?

 

[s9n60310a]

Have you installed any new hardware recently, such as an internal card reader?

No hardware installed.

If the virtual drive counts, then yes, dvdfab virtual drive, virtual clonedrive, and ram disk.

Had them uninstalled due to this problem.

 

[AddRAM]

Those programs would never create all those virtual/phantom drives.

 

[Layback Bear]

Windows Updates did not cause this problem either or their would be many complaining about such a thing.

I'm guessing that a combination of these is causing the problem.

If the virtual drive counts, then yes, dvdfab virtual drive, virtual clonedrive, and ram disk.

No one of them would cause the problem but the combination just might.

These programs are designed to work with Windows 7 but not necessarily with each other.

 

[AddRAM]

You don`t need to setup any virtual drives with those programs if you have a dvd/cd burner.

And as Jack stated, no way did windows update cause that problem.

 

[s9n60310a]

I tried to remove the registries of these 3 programs.
Will observe if the problem still exist.