Interesting drive letter assignment problem

[yarrido]

I have an external hard drive that connects to my laptop through the
USB 2.0 port. The problem just started when I tried to use an old
Iomega Zip drive on the system. Whenever I plug in my external hard
drive, the system will recognize it and then assign it a NEW drive
letter. It does this every time that I plug the drive into the system
until it gets to the drive letter Z and then it does not assign it a
drive letter. Now, the drive is there and you can see it in the device
manager and it is also visible in the Disk Management applet, but what
I need to know is how to change my system so that it will keep the same
drive letter when I plug in the external drive. Can anyone help on
this? Is it some setting in the registry that needs to be changed to
keep it from incrementing to the next available drive letter? It seems
that the system thinks that the drive is still attatched to the system
because when I plug in the external drive, all the prviously used drive
letters for the external drive show up in My Computer. Naturally, I get
an error message that no such drive exists when trying to browse it
from there. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Uwe Sieber]

I have an external hard drive that connects to my laptop through the
USB 2.0 port. The problem just started when I tried to use an old
Iomega Zip drive on the system. Whenever I plug in my external hard
drive, the system will recognize it and then assign it a NEW drive
letter. It does this every time that I plug the drive into the system
until it gets to the drive letter Z and then it does not assign it a
drive letter.

We had somthing similar in microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware
("USB Camera and increasing drive letters").

A drive letter cleanup helped:

Create a system restore point first...

Then open Regedit and go to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\
Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MountPoints2
Delete or rename the whole MountPoints2 hive.

Then go to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices
Delete or rename the whole MountedDevices hive.

Reboot and pray

Then Windows will reassingn all letters and maybe this
fixes the problem...


As you wrote, this is an interesting problem. So we
are interested in seeing these two registry hives
as they are while the problem exists. Yould you save
them before please and eMail me the files? Thanks.



Greetings from Germany

Uwe