Solved Drive Letter Disappeared

[Bhujanga]

I'm running on Windows 7. I have a Passport drive that I always plug into the same USB Port and it has always booted up as Drive I. Suddenly it is booting up as Drive J and I can't get it to go back to drive I. I've gone to the "Disk Management" utility and selected the "Change Drive letter..." option, but the drop down list doesn't contain F, G H or I and there is nothing apparent that is using those designations. Can anyone tell me what is happening and how to remedy the situation?
I do the majority of my work on this passport drive and hence have many shortcuts that use I:, so it is something of an issue to not be able to control it.
Thank you.

 

[samuria]

Welcome to the forum can you post a screenshot from disk management so we can see

 

[Bhujanga]

I couldn't get the drop down list to stay while I took the screenshot but this shows everything leading up to that point. The drop down shows A,B,E and J to Z

 

[DavidE]

I think the drive letter is "stuck" in the Windows registry.
It would take a registry tweak to get it back.

Here is an article about this.
Several Ways to Get the Missing Drive Letters Back in Windows
You need to read the section under
Drive Letter Missing from the List of Available Drive Letters

I've seen this before and fixed it, but it was years ago.

 

[jumanji]

Agree with DavidE. Windows sometimes " forgets" to release the drive letters associated with non-present drives.

Try this.

Download v 0.8.1 of the drivecleanup.zip from Drive Tools for Windows (Roll down on this page till you see DriveCleanup V 1.5 )

(Note: You can use the latest version V1.5.0 too. I have been using v 0.8.1 since long regularly)

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. Disconnect internet/network.

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

After the clean up act, reboot and check whether the drive letter you want is available.

( When you plug in your USB devices after this cleanup, these will be installed afresh. What you have done is to remove all non-present devices and drive letters associated with them and start with a clean slate. Hopefully that should resolve the problem.)

 

[Bhujanga]

I'll give that a try later today. I read the article David sent, but it sounded a little risky for someone of my limited expertise so I was still debating whether to try it or not. I'll post the outcome after I have done it.
Thanks to all.

 

[pbcopter]

From your screen shot it looks like you have a card reader installed and Windows has assigned one of the reader slots as drive I: (see where it shows Drive 4 removable media). This is quite normal. You can change that drive in Disk Managment to something else and then use I: for your Passport drive.

 

[Bhujanga]

That did the trick. I hadn't yet tried the other suggestions but this was the simplest approach so far and everything's back to normal now. Thanks.

 

[pbcopter]

You're most welcome.