Drive letters not assigning to DVDROM or external drives on notebook

Faladu said:

Hi dave (OP),

Did those drives EVER work properly with that OS as installed now?

What was done to that system, just before it stopped working properly, best you can recall....?

Thought about it longer, my suspect is:

SOUTHBRIDGE issue (chipset), just the driver hopefully.

Here's your spot for it's downloads:

ASUS - Notebooks- K52JC

Maybe your INF cache (drivers) is hosed also, I noticed this thread on the subject:

Why aren't my USB Device Divers not working on my laptop?

A good suggestion to reinstall the chipset drivers.

And a good find on search. ( Even I have difficulties in fnding the posts I had made. May be I am getting jaded and that is where younger members like Faluda have an edge. I appreciate it.:))

The options available to the OP now are - after trying out Kaktussoft's suggestions of deleting mounted devices from the registry which I think is the same as removing all non-present devices which the OP has already done as per my post #4 ( I may need to be corrected if I am wrong)-

1. to reinstall chipset drivers

2. try a system restore if a point is available before this event occurred

and

3. Follow the procedures outlined in the thread Faluda has suggested viz.,1. rebuilding the infcache.1 and 2. replacing the drivers which Windows installs with fresh copies from its repository.

If all these fail to bring cheers, call it a valiant effort and do a repair install.

Well, turns out that the Windows Event Log service was the culprit. No idea why, but when I disable it, drive letters stick & everything's fine.

My thoughts on disabling event logging: It’s not just some extraneous service that most people don’t use, it’s a required service that Windows expects to be running, and frankly I would be surprised if you don’t get a crash at some point if it is disabled.

The solution would be to find out the real cause and if it could not be found - there are any number of situations where we fail to find the real cause or culprit :) - do a repair install so that Windows works as it should rather than clipping the wings.

I would suggest that you run sfc scannow and check whether it finds any corrupt file/s and repairs.