External Hard Drive - Drive Letter changed - unable to change back


  1. Posts : 2
    windows 7 home premium 32bit
       #1

    External Hard Drive - Drive Letter changed - unable to change back


    I have a USB external hard drive that I keep all my documents etc on (had it for years)

    I upgraded from Vista Home to & Home Premium then had to upgrade recently to Professional to run my Sage. Through all these upgrades my ext. drive ran fine. Occasionally the drvie letter would change if I had something else plugged into the USB, this was always easily corected in disk management by changing the drive path.

    The connection on the case packed up so I had to get the drive put into a new case, now when I plug it in the drive is assigned G instead of F, I tried to change the drive letter allocation in Disk Management but it won't let me as the program still thinks I have a second ext. hard drive which is labelled F. I suspect this has happened because when the usb connection broke the drive was disconnected suddenly instead of a proper eject.

    How do I get Disk Management to remove the inactive drive - i can't find any obvious way - eject, delete etc are all missing when I click on tools or tasks.

    If there is no easy way then how do I stop program updates for Adobe etc. failing because they can not find the F drive. I don't know why they look at that drive anyway.

    Help.
      My Computer


  2. Posts : 7,055
    Windows 7 Home Premium 32 bit
       #2

    Hi PAMDILL,

    Welcome aboard.

    Try this:

    Download drivecleanup.zip V 0.8.1 from

    Drive Tools for Windows

    Unzip to a folder. In it you will have two folders Win32 and x64, each containing DriveCleanup.exe for Windows 32bit and 64 bit respectively.

    Now unplug all the USB devices from your PC (except of course the Keyboard and mouse), right click on the appropriate DriveCleanup.exe for your system and run it as an administrator.

    This will remove all non-present drives from the registry.

    Reboot and then plug-in your external drive.

    The drive will be installed and hopefully you should be able to assign any free drive letter to it.

    Please report whether it resolved your problem.
      My Computer


  3. Posts : 2
    windows 7 home premium 32bit
    Thread Starter
       #3

    That did not work, it did clear the drive paths and then as soon as I plugged in the ext. drive, F popped back up.

    It only causes a problem with updates to Adobe Reader and opening Reader.

    How can I get round thie, I tried uninstalling Reader but that won't uninstall as it is still looking for F/my documents for some reason.
      My Computer


 

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