Hardware Drivers :: Auto Assign Drive Letter Don't Work Anymore?
Nov 14, 2013
After last "patch-tuesday" my Windows 8.1 don't assign drive letters to hotswaped HDD's and USB keys.
When starting my backupdrive (eSATA), it is now without a drive letter, I can give it one though in disk-management, but before last tuesday, it was given a letter automatic. Same problem when I connect an USB-HDD or an USB-stick.
Is there a way to get back "autoassign of a drive letter"? (don't know the correct word for this function in English).
Purchased a new plug and play 2 TB external hard that is not showing up as an icon in My Computer in Windows 8. It shows up in Devices and appears to be working properly. Driver is up to date. When I go to Disk Management the external is also recognized there but when I right click on the partition window to assign the external HD a drive path letter the drop down menu selection required to do so is greyed out and I am unable to perform the function. Uninstalled the USB driver for the device and re-installed and still nothing. I assume that when I activated Windows 8 on this new laptop I running as an administrator. Checked the unit out on my old laptop which is running Windows 7 and the same problem occurred. Perplexed.
ive been having this for ages on my windows 8 acer laptop, randomly my keyboard doesnt work anymore (happend 5months ago) ive been using desktop keyboard since
I have a problem with my usb root hub after i installed Win 8 from Win7. Only my USB 3.0 don't work anymore... I installed new driver, it detect my WD passport then 2 sec after, nothing anymore and error 19, uninstall then reinstall nothing happen.
I'm booting off my SSD which is drive C: and I have games and programs on an extra hard drive which was origanally drive H: but after a restart it switched to I: and when I go into Disk Management to change it Drive H: isn't there.
My C: is a SSD Id like to have back as one disc, one partition..
The 101 mb 'unallocated' It was previously listed as " reserved system protected drive" I removed and formatted its 101 mb...back to empty, unallocated, can I lose that partition??
It shows up under disc management as a part of c...but really has no drive letter at all it just shows as C:
I have a windows to go installation in a large external hdd, so I have made a second partition to use as data storage.
Now, when I insert the disk on my "normal" windows installation I would expect the data partition to be available... Instead I have to assign a letter to be able to use it.
The disk appears to be online and once assigned a letter you can unplug it and plug it again without having to do the letter assignment again.
BUT, every time I restart the pc I have to do it all over again.
This morning, my laptop wouldn't boot and I got a message saying I needed to use the recovery disk to fix the problem. A little investigating using the command prompt from that disk revealed my system and data partitions had no drive letter assigned to them. A little work with Diskpart fixed that but left me wondering what would have caused them to disappear.
That is, I can allocate it one through drive management but it still doesn't show next switch on in My Computer, so I must go in an allocate it one. Otherwise it works fine. Bit tedious after a while.
Do I have to reformat it completely to regain auto allocation of a letter?
Used to be fine, but not now. A USB 3.0 Toshiba 500 gig external drive (sealed unit) doesn't have this problem.
I have a new Asus Laptop running 64 bit 8.1 Windows Operating System. It has a celeron processor @ 1.86 Ghz with 4GB of Ram.
The DVD/CD Drive will not auto start any discs, DVD or CD. I have set the auto start at "on" and in the control panel I have it checked to auto play all media. It still does not auto start when I insert a cd or dvd. I can however, manually see the files and play a music CD.
After updating to Win 8.1 RTM the Store App doesn't work anymore. Everything else runs fine. After opening the Store App it takes only one or two seconds and the screen get's back to where it was before. The app is still opened, but does the same as soon as it's activated again. Is there a way to reinstall the Store App?
I have a problem whit my new computer on windows 8. Today I turned on the computer, I login, but then, the start menu app's doesn't work anymore! When I wan't to open skype it doesn't work, when I click on desktop it doesn't open.. I need to click on the windows button every time.
I clicked on the windows button, then the app to go to the desktop was clickable, when I was on the desktop, the start menu doesn't appear if I go whit my mouse left under. If I go whit my mouse right, that menu also doesn't appear. Also some programs doesn't open anymore automatically..
The button for the music also doesn't work, I can't turn of the music etc..
Windows 8.1. I had an issue with the general user folder name, which was shown as "Alex_000". Although this was a cosmetic issue only, I wanted to change this to "Alex". I successfully managed this by changing about 50 entries in the registry (via regedit).
So fine so good. Now I found out that there are still some leftovers with "Alex_000" in the Windows system, although I have tried to find every bit and peace, where possible:
When I try to open "Add or Remove Programs" in the Metro surface, I get an error message:
Windows cannot find 'C:Usersalex_000...Classic_{a lot of weird chars}.settingscontent-ms'. Make sure you typed the name correctly, and then try again.
Somewhere in the system, there must still be links with Alex_000 existing. I tried searching the registry, tried a simple search on C: disc - no success.
In other words: Everything works fine - except of starting the apps from the metro surface for "remove software", or "user accounts", and maybe some other system apps, which I haven´t discovered yet. If I do the same from the desktop, no problem - all these apps work well!
So where are the referring links for such system apps within the metro surface stored? Obviously not in the registry... How/where can i find these orphaned links for the said apps in Metro?
When I installed Win8 (at this point, updated to Win8.1 Update) on drive V:, it changed it to C:. Since I'm used to the drive letters as they used to be, I'd like to change it back to V:. I figure I'll have to change all the registry entries for installed programs from C: to V:.
How to confirm that I'll have to manually make those registry changes?
Alright, I just installed my Windows 8 Pro from a USB drive as I was installing it I was installing Windows 8 on the W:/ drive but once it was installed I came to found out that that My C:/ drive which was originally Windows 7's drive letter now belongs to Windows 8, and now the drive that is now Windows 7's is D:/ is is possible to change it back a W: drive or something? and yes, Windows 7 is the main partition on the system, I'm not sure why it changed but it's actually the first time this has happened.
I've installed Windows 8 starting the installer from Windows 8 RP and I've just noticed that it picked up the drive letters from the old system. Now my system drive is Y instead of C , because in the old system that partition was Y. If I try to change the drive letter in the Drive Management it gives an error. how to change system drive letter in Windows 8 RTM?
I tried to change the drive letter because it wont appear, but it didnt work. I have tried the CMD method with the volumes but the volume did not show up. All I know is that its a G-Technology hard drive. I tried formatting it to NTFS but that wont work. Basically I tried everything and nothing works. P.S The drive is Disk1...
I have an SSD drive with 2 partitions on it. 1st partition has Win 7 on it as drive letter C. 2nd Partition has Win 8 on it as Drive letter W. At 1 point in time if I booted to Win 8 the drive letter would dynamically change from drive letter W to Drive letter C and make Win 7 drive letter W. The revers was true if I booted to Win 7. Something has changed somewhere, where this dynamic drive letter changing is no longer working. When I boot to Win 8 the drive letter remains to be drive letter W & Win 7 is still drive C. This is causing problems when I'm booted to Win 8 with regard to installing & using apps while in Win 8 since the C drive is really the Win 7 system drive.
How can I fix this to get back the dynamic flip flopping of drive C? I confess to being somewhat ignorant when dealing with this particular area of things.
I just recently built a new Windows 8 machine. Since I knew I was going to be getting an SSD down the road, I planned ahead:
Nutshell, the C: drive, the boot drive, is at the end of the partition, sized to 220 DB, so I knew it would be smaller than the 240/256GB drive I knew I'd eventually be getting. The Users folder is on the D: drive, so the C: partition is only the OS and apps. Everything's dandy.
I found EasyBCD and used it to move the boot manager over into the C: partition, so theoretically that's all I need to move over to the new drive. So what I want to do is move the C: partition over to the SSD, have it stay C: once it's there, and then have it boot into that partition. (Note that I cannot disconnect the hard drive when it's time to reboot because that's where the Users folder lives and I don't want to break that.)
I keep running into problems with the "keeping it C" part. When I clone the drive over, the old drive stays as C: (as you would expect), and the new drive gets a new letter. Attempts to change those letters using DISKPART from the Win 8 install DVD have been either futile or disastrous.
I've been using the free version of Macrium as my cloning / imaging tool...is there a better free tool I should be using?
I'm just going through the process of personalizing a new Inspiron 14z with Windows 8. The one thing that has me stumped are all the partitions that ship installed on the drive, due to a combination of everything being different on Win8, Dell doing things their own way, and GPT formatting. Generally I would like to know what the heck all those partitions are for, but it's fine if that will be a slow learning process. Specifically and immediately, I need to change the drive letter assigned to the "WINRETOOLS" partition. Currently it's D:, and the problem is that for 10 years I've been using D: as my data partition, and quite a number of applications, configurations, settings, etc. assume that all my files are on D:. For instance, by having all my music on D:, I can sync iTunes library and preference files between machines, and all ratings and playlists match from one machine to the next. Same thing for my photos. Same thing for a bunch of utilities like FTP consoles, sync utilities...
In a prior version of Windows, I would just go into Disk Management, right click the partition in question, assign a different drive letter, and job done. On my machine, the 2GB WINRETOOL partition doesn't even show as having a drive letter in Disk Management, despite the fact that it's D: in Win Explorer. Additionally, the only right click option is "help". I've taken that option, and, despite its aspirations, it's not useful.
How can I change that drive letter to something else? Should WINRETOOLS even have a drive letter in Explorer (some posts I've seen indicate that it should be hidden)? If I do manage to change the drive letter, will that break its function, whatever that is?
My machine has a 500GB spinning disk, which has all the aforementioned partitions. I've shrunk the C: partition to 80GB, in preparation for creating a data partition. I have not yet formatted the unassigned space as I would like to solve this WINRETOOLS thing first. Finally, there is a 32GB SSD that I've set up as an Intel Smart Response cache, and it's no longer visible to the OS.
,Im running Windows 8.1 Pro and everything app related ran fine.Weather, news etc. got it all configured and setup nicely on my home screen.I dont remember to have done anything substantial to my files, but one day i had to look at this screen:
The apps dont work anymore, opening one of them just shows a blank screen.uninstalling an app works, but while reinstalling i get the error code 0x80070490 and cant reinstall, weather app in this example.Other apps except the default microsoft shipped ones, seem to behave fine.I did wsreset and downloaded that app fix tool, nothing changed.
I would like for my computer to sign in automatically with my Microsoft account, however, when I enabled Remote Desktop Connection (for I would also like to be accessed remotely), the automatically sign-in function doesn't work, because sign-in screen is now set by default to log in with local account rather than Microsoft one. However, I do not possess one, and if I tried to create on and make it sign in automatically, the screen said wrong username or password. Which I don't understand at all.
I have a Dell laptop Inspiron 15R 7537 that came with Windows 8. Yesterday I upgraded to Windows 8.1. Everything seemed to work fine after the upgrade. I shut down and re-booted several times with no issues. When I turned the computer on as usual today, I got the log in screen, then it briefly went to the desktop, then came a gray screen that blocks 99% of the desk top. This gray screen says "please wait" and has a cancel button at the bottom. It hangs forever and the cancel button doesn't work. It gives no other information.
I read several threads on the Microsoft Windows forum and this seems to be a common problem. How to boot using the Windows 8 recovery media disk that came with the Dell computer. I selected Troubleshoot, then Advanced Options, then Automatic Repair. I got a message that it couldn't do an automatic repair, so that didn't work. Next I tried System Restore, but I got a message that there were no restore points available from which to restore. Just to clarify - the Recovery Media Disk I have from Dell is for Windows 8 - not 8.1 - so maybe that's the problem.
The computer is totally worthless the way it is now, so unless there is some fix for the hanging gray screen in Windows 8.1, I would be happy just to reload the original Windows 8 Operating System. At least that worked.
Windows update has been really messing with my pc lately. I ran update and when it installed the updates my integrated mouse ended up not working. I rolled back update and installed the updates one by one and the one I ended up not installing was the camera codec pack. Now the problem I am having is that my touchscreen won't work. If I talk to HP support they do the most basic thing they can and then when they can't fix it they tell me that I have to ship it to them because hardware is broken.
I am trying to get my external hard drives setup from a freshly rebooted installed computer. I recently placed an external hard drive with all my back up files on my computer, but this drive is not going to be my main drive. I have two others I will be using as a main hdd and a backup drive that are brand new.
So, the question is, if I were to use a utility like the Windows 8.1 disk management feature to either delete the drive letter or even change it to another one, will that mess up the external hard drive or even lose data? Because until I transfer my files to my backup disk I am afraid of losing my only copy of my files.
I use a Sandisk Cruzer Extreme USB 3.0 32gb flash drive. When I plug the flash drive in, autoplay does not come up however the flash drive shows up on My Computer, but not Device Manager. It does not show up on the tray (the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon), but other USB flash drives do. The drive is fully working and I can transfer files to and from the drive, I just cannot autoplay nor eject the drive safely.
I've done the obvious such as ensuring autoplay is enabled, formatting the drive, trying different ports, and now I'm not sure what the problem can be.
I've observed that it's only the first USB port on the front panel that has this problem, but all other USB drives autoplay fine on this port. (I think only usb 2.0 - 3.0 devices do not autplay)
I was recently experimenting with partitions and i had to assign 50 GB of disk space to a partition. Sadly, I noticed that after I deleted it I can't add it back to my main hard drive's space. How I can do this so I have all my disk space again?
I have done installation of windows xp sp3 on a guest virtual machine and i have problem with networking. On my host machine (windows 8.1 ) i have 1 static ip and i can't have anotherone. So from this ip i have to share network to guest machine. The guest machine tries to get ip from dhcp but it can't. When i give it manual ip address (the ip from host computer) it works ok but i have to turn off host's network card because they cant have tha same ip address.
