Doubled drive letters

[simonc]

I have been doing some repartitioning and adjusting sizes of partitions and
the result is confusion in my windows explorer drive letters. My main drive
still appears as C. I also use a second volume within an extended partition,
which I have assigned as drive D in disk management. However this drive also
appears in the drive list as drive M. There doesn't seem any way to deassign
the letter M. The other volume in the extended partition, plus another
separate partition also appear with drive letters automatically assigned, and
if I try to reassign these letters again it duplicates the drive in Explorer.

Is there a way I can get rid of these duplicated drives, and give every
drive the letter I want it to have instead of the one the computer wants to
give it!

Grateful for advice.

 

[Pete Carr]

Hi,
I have had the same problem with drives being named not actually how they
should be after I partitiond some drives etc.
Go to the START button then to "Adminitrative Tools" and the choose
"Computer Managment". Then go down to disk management and open the screen
full window.
You will see all the hard drives and CD/DVD drives on your computer.

You will have to give each drive a tempoary drive letter much higher
(including the CD/DVD drives) then they show on the screen. Then start at
the drive you want to be D and right click on it and a drop down window wil
allow you to give it another drive name which you you would choose D. You
will have to do it for all your drives but the trick is first giving all your
drives (except C) a much higher name (like M for one N for one and so on so
you can have avaiable lower drive letters to choose from etc.) Also make
sure you know which drive you are working on because they do show up with off
the wall drive names etc. The best way to do that is check all your drive
sizes (partitions) and write them down so you know axactly which drive is
which before you start.

It's fairly easy...
Pete Carr

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

Have you rebooted since you changed drive letters?

 

[simonc]

Thanks for these replies. Unfortunately no joy so far. Even after rebooting
and assigning drives letters from the back end of the alphabet I'm still
seeing doubled drives in Explorer.

My drive D (or the one I'd like to be D) continues to show up as drive M in
Explorer, regardless of what letter I assign in in Disk Management.
Strangely, though, in Disk Management it's only listed with the assigned
drive letter and not as M. If I remove the assigned drive letter it continues
to show as Drive M in Explorer, and letter M is not available for any other
drive in disk Management.

Any other suggestions?

 

[Uwe Sieber]

I have been doing some repartitioning and adjusting sizes of partitions and
the result is confusion in my windows explorer drive letters. My main drive
still appears as C. I also use a second volume within an extended partition,
which I have assigned as drive D in disk management. However this drive also
appears in the drive list as drive M. There doesn't seem any way to deassign
the letter M. The other volume in the extended partition, plus another
separate partition also appear with drive letters automatically assigned, and
if I try to reassign these letters again it duplicates the drive in Explorer.

Is there a way I can get rid of these duplicated drives, and give every
drive the letter I want it to have instead of the one the computer wants to
give it!

You can remove an surplus drive letter by entering this commandline:

mountvol X: /d


Uwe

 

[simonc]

Thanks for this idea. I removed the unwanted drive letters and reassigned the
letters I wanted and thought this had solved the problem. Unfortunately when
I rebooted the machine the unwanted drive letters all appeared again in
Explorer, so the drives are still showing with double drive letters.