Solved 1 partition NOT showing in My Computer

[Porthiir]

I have an external hard drive partitioned into 4 drives (F,H,J,K - I know drive letters not sequential - due possibly in part to 2 DVD drives & Alcohol, etc...).

In My Computer Drive F not showing: See attached

In Disk Manager ALL Drives showing: See attached

I have checked permissions & everything else I can think of. Every partition has the exact same settings/permissions.

Why is just the one partition not showing up?

 

[Golden]

In Disk Management, assign it a different drive letter, say P:

Does it show now?

 

[Porthiir]

Tried changing the drive letter twice & even rebooted computer... still not showing in My Computer.

 

[Porthiir]

Not sure why, but tried renaming all the drive letters (putting them into sequence & removing F from the list entirely) & now it's fine. All Partitions (drives) are showing just fine in My Computer.

 

[jumanji]

It is quite likely that the drive letter F - as well as some other drive letters - got locked on to other drives that you used earlier and were not released by Windows when those were removed.

It is a distinct possibility since you also have alcohol installed.

To pre-empt such problems, do a drive cleanup periodically.

This will release the drive letters that get locked to non-present devices.

Disable creation of Virtual drives in alcohol settings. ( you can enable as many drives as you want later after the drive cleanup)

Download v 0.8.1 of the drivecleanup.zip from Drive Tools for Windows.

Unzip it to a folder, say drivecleanup.

You will have two folders Win32 and x64 each containing DriveCleanup.exe for 32 bit and 64 bit respectively.

Remove all USB storage devices from your system (except your Keyboard and mouse) and reboot.

Right click on the DriveCleanup.exe and run as administrator. (Use the *.exe file appropriate for your bit version of Windows.).

This will release all the drive letters and registry entries associated with non-present devices.

Once this process is over, assign drive letters in sequence to all your partitions.( For physical optical drives I always give letters at the end like X, Y,Z. That will leave all partitions to take drive letters starting from D in sequence.)

Thereafter your Virtual drives when enabled will only take on drive letters after your partition drive letters and you will never again encounter this problem.

You may still get into a problem of some USB drives not getting drive letters. A periodic drive cleanup will release the locked drive letters.