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Windows 7 does not assign drive letters to external HDDs
Hi
I'm having some problems with some of my external HDDs. I have a 500Gbs WD Caviar Green and a 500Gbs Seagate ST350032, both using a Cooler Master XCraft 360 enclosure. A few days ago, I decided to move 50GBs from D to C using Paragon 2010. I already did this on my laptop without any problems. When I first restarted the PC after all this, I was asked to install some Win Updates. Since then my 2 external HDD stopped being visible in Windows Explorer. At first I thought there's something wrong with my HDDs but then I noticed that there were both visible in Computer Management but had no drive letter assigned. I assigned the letters manually everything went fine till my 1st reboot. Every time I reboot my system, those 2 HDDS have no drive letter assigned and I have to do it manually so that I can use them. Also, if I insert a USB memory stick that is assigned with a letter assigned for my HDDs, if I try to connect them, same thing happens. I also noticed that after moving those 50GBs from D to C, between C and D I have about 95Mbs of free space visible in Computer Management. The partition table looks something like this: C, 95Mbs Free Space(not unallocated), D,E,F,G.Another thing that happens lately (for about 3 months) is that I cannot safe remove my WD My Book Elite. Since I couldn't find a way to fix this, I switched to Quick Removal Policy (Better Performance was set by default for this one). Could this happen because I have too many partitions and driver, although this never happened before, not even on XP or Vista. I have 6 partitions (C-H), 2 Optical Drives and 2 Virtual Drives (I-L) and an internal card reader that has 4 slots permanently assigned (M-P). Also I have 2 network drives (Y-Z). I tried to unmount the Virtual Drives and the network drives and also removed all other external drives without any luck. I have 2 internal HDDs, with one primary partition each. Also, My Book Elite has 2 partitions (one is for storage and one caries the embedded software, both seen as primary partitions). Also, all my other external HDDs are seen as primary partitions. Don't know what's the limit for partitions and primary partitions for Windows so I thought I should point this out. Off Topic - After installing Win Updates on both, my desktop PC and my laptop I had to reactivate Windows twice since I was notified that I'm using a non genuine version of Windows (this thing keeps happening from time to time).
I noticed that every time I connect a HDD I get this error in Event Viewer: Encrypted volume check: Volume information on \\?\Volume{e87200fe-4968-11df-a541-001e8cc96001} cannot be read.
Also this appears when I enter Computer Management: Unexpected failure. Error code: 490@01010004