Drive has 2 drive letters for the same partition

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Everything is fine in “Device Manager”. How do I correct this?

Marc

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How to change, assign and remove drive letters on computers running Windows XP or Windows 2000
Note: you can’t change the drive letter of your OS
Run Disk Management, for this:
Click Control Panel > Click Performance and Maintenance > click Administrative Tools > Computer Management > and in left panel click Disk Management
Or right click on My Computer and select Manage and then select Disk Management.

In right panel right click your drive and select “Change Drive Letter and Path”.
To change: in dialog box click change and finally change the letters assigned to your drive.
To add: click add and browse for drive path
To remove: click remove, windows will display a warning message, click ok to continue.

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I know how to do that and how to change the drive letters using the registry. FYI using the registry you can change the boot drive letter. My question is how do I correct having the same drive but two different drive letter “D” and “I”.

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Use Disk Management to remove one of the drive letters, preferably I. You don’t need to edit the registry.

cheers, Paul

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Paul the “I” drive only shows up in Explorer. I tried deleting the registry key in both regular Windows and Safe mode and when I open up Windows again the key is recreated.

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Something is creating it, do you have TruCrypt loaded?
When did it start happening? After you loaded new software?

cheers, Paul

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Paul it started yesterday. I’ve been having one hell of a time migrating the partitions, including “C”, from one drive to another larger drive. I haven’t been able to get the PC to boot from the new drive. I changed all the drive letters on the new drive, which includes a partition for Program Files and one for My Documents, to the correct drive letter including “C”. When I couldn’t get the drive to boot I changed the new “C” to “R” and the old “C” back to “C” and everything worked fine. Here’s a link to the thread about those problems.

http://windowssecrets.com/forums/showthread//136595-I-can-t-get-my-cloned-quot-C-quot-drive-to-start-Windows.

I had some big blocks of time so I decided to try it again. I moved everything back to the old drive and changed all the drive letters and this is when the problem started. I deleted all the partitions on the new drive and was going to use the WD version of Acronis to clone the entire drive manually setting up the partitions and ran into and error problem with Acronis and it telling me that there is still data on the drive an it can’t moved the data.

I decided I needed to get the drive letter problem resolved before I do anything else with the cloning.

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Personally I’d clone first. Then you have a backup.

I would expect multiple drive letters if you had multiple disks with multiple partitions. Windows then sets a drive letter based on the order in which it “sees” the partitions.

cheers, Paul

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Is it possible that somewhere along the line a subst command got executed? If you do the following:

subst m: d:

Then you will see two drive letters in Explorer for your D drive, but not in the disk management console. To check if this is your problem then unsubst the bogus drive letter as follows (assuming the bogus letter is M)

subst m: /d

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Do I run that command line?

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Yes, open a Command Prompt.

cheers, Paul

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A while back, I had a similar problem. Except over a period of time, every available drive letter would map itself to the same network drives. Turned out it was Findfast from MS Office 97 that was the culprit. Once I disabled the useless memory hogging Findfast, the problem went away.

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Just a question about this.
Would giving each ‘drive’ a distinctive name cure this?
Or at least prevent such a quandary in the future?

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Would giving each ‘drive’ a distinctive name cure this?

No. You would still have multiple drives pointing to the same disk.

cheers, Paul

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Everything is fine in “Device Manager”. How do I correct this?

Marc

I had this problem on my Windows 7 system. Explorer showed drive (partition) C: with both “C:” and “T:” drive letters. Change name, name changed on both, etc. I tried every suggestion I could find on the web. Even searched the registry for “T:” but found nothing.

Then, the other day, I was copying TV shows from my Freeview box’s external USB drive with the “Ext2fsd” program to my Windows system:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd/

While looking around the menus I saw that it had the ability to remove drive letters. I highlighted the “T:” letter and deleted it. Voila! No more “ghost” drive letter in Explorer.

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