Unused drive letters

XP Home Edition SP2. Disk Director Suite version 10 build 2,117.

I need to allocate a drive letter to a partition on one of my two external hard drives but none are available in Change Letter. The last one I used was Z:. Drive letters K: to N: are not used but are inaccessible. Is there any way to make these available so that Windows Explorer can recognise the partition?

Any advice would be much appreciated.

hac32.

 

One way is to download TweakUI from Microsoft. Here you'll be able to tick which drive letters you want to be available to XP.

There is another way, but it escapes me for the moment.

I take it you mean Computer Management under Disk Management, if you click on the 'ADD' or 'CHANGE' drive letters K....N is not available?

Colin

 

Hi Colin,

Thank you for your advice. In TweakUI>My Computer>Drives all of the drive letters - A: to Z: - are checked but K: to N: are not available in Change Letter in Disk Director. I think I used the letters previously before repartitioning but although they are no longer used they are still not available. Tried unchecking K: to N: in Drives but they were still not available.

In My Computer>Computer Management>Storage>Disk Management, when I try to Change Letter & Paths for the subject partition & click Add Drive Letter & Path, I can't type a letter in the box, & no letters are shown in the drop-down list.

Best wishes,
Allan.

 

Ah this is strange, I'm sure XP should allow those letters to be remounted after being rebooted - if those letters have been previously used.

Have you tried booting into safe mode and seeing if the letters become available there?

XP keeps its' list of drive letters used /mounted in registry, but I personally haven't fiddled with this so I hesitate in recommending this as a course of action.

Perhaps there is a Tech Note or Knowledge Based article on MS website for this problem.

OK there is this - but it is at your own risk - make a copy of registry or this particular key.

Startup regedit32 and drill down to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices .

Right click and choose permissions and make sure ADMIN has full access.

Close regedt32 and open regedit (must be regedit and NOT regedt32 ), again find HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices, then, look down the right hand pane until you find your assigned drive letters.

They will be under \DosDevices\drive letter.

If you find K.....N listed there, then for example right click the K entry and select rename select another drive letter perhaps Z this will then allow K to be re-used.

I don't know what happens if you delete the K...N entries, whether XP will then allow you to re-allocate them - I think you should back up your whole system before trying this. Or at the least have your XP CD handy so that you can do a repair install. In fact that might be the way to go about this in the first place .

If you try the registry thing, make sure you rerun regedt32 and change the permissions back to whatever you might have altered them from.

Colin

 

Hello Allan,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Partition and Disk Managing Software.

Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response.

Please download the latest version of Acronis drivers, install it with disabled logging and see if the problem still persists.

If the problem still persists then enable logging by running the Acronis drivers installation package once again, reproduce the problem and collect the c:\snapapi.log file.

Please also do the following:

- Download and unpack the Device Tree application:
- Run the application;
- Completely unfold the \Driver\Disk and \Driver\FtDisk branches;
- Move the margin to the right in order to see all the items;
- Make a screen shot.

Please note that the application may crash the system when you exit, so we recommend you to save all your work and close other programs prior to running it.

Please also create Acronis Report and Windows System Information as it is described in Acronis Help Post and submit a request for technical support. Attach all the collected files and information to your request along with the step-by-step description of the actions taken before the problem appears and the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with the solution.

Thank you.
--
Kirill Omelchenko