Drive Letter not showing up in disk management

[endoftheline2]

My External Drive is normally assigned the letter G, however when I plugged in it now it was assigned H. Looking in Disk management, G does not show up in the list of letters available to change the assigned letter to, and it does not appear in disk management as being assigned to any drive I currently have.

I saw another thread on this and it said to go here in the registery:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices

And rename the letter after the "DosDrives part"

I tried that but it still did not free up Letter G, and I also tried deleting the entry that appears for G:

\DosDrives\G:

But that also did not free it up and when I opened the registry again that G: entry was back. There are also others keys in the folder like:

\??\Volume{c9a21be8-9438-11df-9735-005056c00008}

That maybe assigned with these letters somehow so I'm wondering if anyone knows what else I should delete or change to be able to assign the letter G again.

 

[sygnus21]

Not sure what the deal is with that but out of curiousity are you using the same USB port when plugging in the drive?

Also have you done any BIOS updates or changes recently?

 

[endoftheline2]

The Drive is connected via esata to the same port. However it seems I that letter G has been freed up now. It seems deleting the \DosDrives\G: registry key and then renaming the H: key that my drive was currently assigned to G, and then rebooting worked, and my drive then became drive G as normal

 

[whs]

If a device is disconnected, the drive letter becomes available and the system will assign it to the next device that needs a letter - even to a virtual disk if e.g. you open an image. That may have been your case because the virtual disk disappears after a reboot.

 

[sygnus21]

Well ther you go

Peace