Drive letters not visible except A, C and D

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Hello, I am running Win XP SP3. I have a situation where additional drive letters are not visible in Windows Explorer or File Save As or File Open Dialog boxes. This applies to a slaved hard drive as well as any usb sticks I attach. I have created shortcuts to the drives on my desktop and can access the drives via the shortcuts and they all work fine. I do not have any drive letter conflicts and have confirmed this in the Disk Management. I would however, like to be able to access the drives via the normal way, have them show up in the aforementioned windows. Once I click on the shortcut to bring up the drive in Windows Explorer, the drive letter that is assigned to that device appears along with all its folders as well as the folders on my C drive. I can navigate back and forth between the two drives as long as that window isn’t closed. Once the window is closed, the other drive(s) no longer appear.

Any ideas or suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

David

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Check these two articles and see if they apply to you at all. I’m reaching here. lol

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297694

http://www.rm.com/Support/TechnicalArticle.asp?cref=TEC591242

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Thanks for the suggestion Mike but I don’t think those apply to me. I have this problem with a fixed drive as well as the USB’s.

I did just notice something and wonder if it might help. My drive C is NTFS. All others are recognized as FAT or FAT32. Could there be a setting somewhere that isn’t allowing the non-NTFS drives to show up until they are physically accessed?

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…I have created shortcuts to the drives on my desktop and can access the drives via the shortcuts and they all work fine…

What kind of shortcuts are these? What target do they have?
How do the disk drives appear in Disk Management? Does it show them at all? Do they have associated drive letters?

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What kind of shortcuts are these? What target do they have?
How do the disk drives appear in Disk Management? Does it show them at all? Do they have associated drive letters?

I have a desktop shortcut named “Shortcut to Disk E”, which is a slave HD. The target of the shortcut is E:. I have the same setup for USB drives I put in, setup for G:. If the USB isn’t in, the shortcut doesn’t work and has a ? on the shortcut icon.

In Disk Management, my drive E is labeled as Local Disk, USB is labeled as UDISK (G:) in the top pane of the Disk Mgmt window and Disk1 and Disk2 respectively in the bottom pane. My C: drive is identified as Disk0 in the bottom pane and has no label in the top pane.

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Can you try right clicking the partitions at the bottom right of disk manager, select “Change drive letter or path…” and assign the correct drive letters to each partition.

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There us no option to change the drive letter for Disk0, either partition or for Disk1. It will only let me add a letter and the list begins with H.

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There us no option to change the drive letter for Disk0, either partition or for Disk1. It will only let me add a letter and the list begins with H.

How strange.

I assume you have rebooted the computer without changing the symptoms.

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Many times. This problem has been in existence for several years. Just haven’t found a solution and was hoping this venue might provide one.

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Do you have Tweakui installed?

If so then look to see if the drives have been hidden.

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Well don’t I feel dumb. Stuart, you hit the nail on the head. The other drives were not checked so I checked them and voila.

Thank you so much!

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Well don’t I feel dumb. Stuart, you hit the nail on the head. The other drives were not checked so I checked them and voila.

Thank you so much!

That’s a relief, I was starting to really struggle with this.

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