External drive reassigns itself to an old unused drive letter

[cdt]

Hello:

I am a newbie and panicked! I have a Dell Inspiron 580 (I think it's about 9 yrs old) computer with Windows 7 Operating system, and a Dell 1TB HDD External hard drive. Yesterday when I logged in, my external drive letter (N) was not there. I have it plugged into a usb hub. I rebooted the computer, that didn't work, I moved the external drive to the usb on the front of the hard drive, that didn't help, I rebooted again; that didn't help.


When I went to diskmgmt.msc it shows a I:mirror image(this was the drive letter I assigned to an external drive I had before I purchased the Dell external drive). Back then my backup service had a mirror image service along with their back up, and I used the I:drive as the mirror image. When I purchased the Dell external drive, seems like they advised me to leave the I and rename the new one, which i did.



I can't figure out why it has assigned my N as I and it doesn't show the data when I click on it. The N is no longer showing. I am going to attach a word document with some screen shots and error messages in the "computer management". If you have any ideas, they would be appreciated. (It was working fine the day before, and I didn't do anything unusual. Thanks very much for any help; I am freaking.


cdt

 

[Paul Black]

Hi cdt,

Welcome to SevenForums!

I can't figure out why it has assigned my N as I and it doesn't show the data when I click on it. The N is no longer showing. I am going to attach a word document with some screen shots and error messages in the "computer management". If you have any ideas, they would be appreciated. (It was working fine the day before, and I didn't do anything unusual.

Have you tried:-

Click Start => in the search box type compmgmt.msc => Enter => Storage => Disk Management => right-click the drive letter you want to change => Change Drive Letter and Paths... => Change.

Assign it the drive letter you want to use and click OK.

I hope this helps!

 

[cdt]

Thank you very much for the response. I thought I would receive an email when there was a response, but I did not.



I'm not sure if the drive letter is the issue. When I plug the drive into another computer, the content looks the old destroyed external drive assigned as I. Shouldn't I see what was actually saved to the external drive? 2014 is the date of the files showing when I open it from any computer. How on earth could this happen? Also, any ideas on the "errors" in the windows management screen shots?

 

[samuria]

Is the disk a drive image when a drive is plugged into windows it writes a disk signature to the drive so it knows the drive if you have 2 drives with same signature windows gets confused as it has two drives the same