XP reassigned drive letters

[Guest]

Today XP decided to reassign drive letters. My d: drive is now listed (in my computer) as an "other" drive with a red circle with white question mark named Local Disk. What was my d: drive is now listed as the g: drive. All the other drives are ok. I've tried using disk management to assign the g: drive to d: but no letters below g are available. Nothing my tech friend & I have tried works. We can't access, rename or delete the "other" drive. It doesn't show up in disk management or windows explorer. We're stumped any advice?

Thanks

Bill

 

[Guest]

The 'Local Disk' has some problem - hence the red circle etc.

Check that it is properly conneted and that it is recognised correctly in BIOS.

Failing that you should try Disk Management to see what error or messages appear, also Device Manager to see what errors are reported.

All drives will change letters if a 'lower order' value is remove, so don't attempt to correct this manually until you've fixed the 'd drive'.

Windows Assigns Defualt value to Drive letters:

A + B - Floppy Drive
C - Primary Master [or first single IDE]
D - Secondary Master [or second partition of Primary Master if one drive]
E - Primary Slave [or second partition of Primary Master if > than one drive]
F - Secondary Slave [or second partition of Secondary Master if > than one drive]
and so on: there are some other complications when mixing IDE HDD and Optical Devices, but this shuld help you get a reasonable idea.

You need to get to the cause of a drive being isedntified as faulty: for your D Drive that is.