drive letter unavailable?

[dukeofurl]

I have 3 drives, an SSD that is my boot drive, and internal storage, and then an external 4 GB that is also storage. The Boot drive is obviously C, the internal was D and after a recent reinstall, D was not available for some reason, so that drive is now E, and the external is F.


Then after a recent crash, some weird stuff happened, a 100 MB partition of the C drive that wasn't there before, showed up and all the drive letters were bumped. I reassigned (With Disk Manager) that mystery partition to W and then tried to reassign the internal to E and external to F. The internal went just fine, but F is not showing up as a choice. I don't have any idea why.

I tried reassigning it with Diskpart and that didn't work. I read some solutions involving editing the registry, but to me that's a last resort.

Anyone know how I can get F back?

 

[Brink]

Hello Dukeofurl,

F: wouldn't be available since it has already been previously assigned to a drive. This is done to prevent drive letter conflicts for programs that may look for a specific drive that had that letter when available.

You could use OPTION TWO in the tutorial below to remove the F: drive letter entry in the registry to have it available to then change whatever letter is currently being used for the external to F: now.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/82994-drive-letter-add-change-remove-windows-7-a.html

Hope this helps,
Shawn

 

[dukeofurl]

Hmm, darn, I didn't want to edit the registry, but it looks like I have to.

Ok, thanks

 

[Brink]

You're welcome. It's not so bad. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.