Drivers/Hardware :: How To Assign A Range To Drive Letters
Feb 10, 2016
How do I assign a range of letters, that can be used for e.g. external flash disks, external ssd's/hdd's or memory cards?
I have this nasty issue. I have two Network Attached Drives, on server. They work fine, D and E. But I also have NAS [DS 716+] which is on NAS drive F:. Whenever I shut down my DS 716+, and I connect some external hdd/ssd/memory card, it always asigns letter F:. Which makes these devices quiet inaccessible, or hard accessible, I can't double click them to open, I need to type in manually F: etc.
Is there any way via msc or something, where I can define a range of all external hdd's/ssd's and/or memory cards?
I tried the Windows 10 upgrade when it first came out and immediately went back to 8.1 when I couldn't get a single one of my internal SATA hard drives to mount.. I have 5 of them, and I just wasn't about to mess with that when 8.1 had no problems at all. Now I have tried it again and the same problem is happening. I want to see if I can figure it out this time. I am using the latest SATA and Chipset drivers for Win10 64 bit from Gigabyte's Website (I am using a Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H Rev. 1.1.
I am "testing" Win10 using a bootable clone of my main SSD (that still has 8.1 on it) and I upgraded it to 10 just to mess with so I can figure out this ridiculous problem.
My problem is that all of my internal SATA hard drives (with the exception of the system drive) cannot be assigned a drive letter in Disk Management. They show as healthy NTFS partitions but I get 1 of 2 different errors when I click on "Change Drive letters and Paths":
1. "Virtual Disk Manager: The System cannot find the file specified."
2 "Disk Management: The operation filed to complete because the Disk Management Console view is not up-to date. Refresh the view by using the refresh task. If the problem persists close the Disk Management console, then restart disk management or restart the computer" Hint: none of the recommended fixes in the error message change anything.
I HAVE been able to assign the partitions a letter and mount them using a third party disk manager called "MiniTool Partition Wizard". It lets me mount the partitions and it works! ..However, if I restart the computer, I am back to square one and have to manually assign each drive letter for each partition every time.
This is easily the worst experience I have ever had upgrading an OS, and one of the most mind boggling issues I have had with Windows in general. I really like Windows 10 and want to keep using it but half of my hard drives being un-mountable is a complete deal breaker right now.
I have an external drive where the electronics of the case has failed. I have switched the drive into my pc so that I can use it as an internal drive. The drive is still operational but I cannot see it listed in my drives. Opening up disk manager shows the drive is clearly visible there but is no volume letters assigned to it. The easy option would be to delete the partitions and create new. However, the drive is divided into several partitions which I want to keep as they contain a lot of important data files (years of photos for one thing). Disk manager wont allow me to assign any drive letters (option is grayed out) and disk partition only shows me a single partition not the 5 partitions I have on the drive. how do I assign volume letters without losing my data?
I clean installed Win 10 RTM version on my laptop a few weeks ago. I have a basic GPT setup.
Installation went fine, however the installer created a 'Recovery' drive (D with a size of 600 MB (262 MB free) & a 'Local Disk' drive (E with a size of 451 MB (128 MB free).
I am stumped as to why it assigned letters to them. If you see the attachment of a snapshot of Partition Wizard, you will be able to see the setup.
My question, besides why the assigned letters is the where the status is listed as 'None'. Is it safe to delete these?? I am assuming that the only partitions i need to keep are the 'ESP', which is 'Active & Boot' - so it is needed to be able to boot into Windows. How about the one listed as 'Other' - the capacity is 128 MB & all 128 MB are used - do i save this one as well?
I really wanted a less cluttered setup - so when all these partitions were created, particularly 'D' & 'E', i was perplexed as to why they were created.
I cannot assign a drive letter to a partition. When I right click the partition I only get the word "Help". The partition states as "Healthy (Recovery Partition).
I have a new computer. I want to clone the system to a new SSD. Can I change the drive letter of the SSD to C: after cloning?
My new computer (an ASUS) currently has Windows 8.1. I intend to upgrade to Windows 10 before I do anything more. I will move the old Windows elsewhere before cloning if that is possible.
I have the SSD installed physically but it is not formatted or anything. I intend to use the Samsung Data Migration tool to do the clone. During the clone, the SSD will of course not have the drive letter "C". After the cloning, it must have the drive letter "C", correct? I know we can assign drive letters in Disk Management. I am familiar with partitions and I know that the boot drive/partition is marked as "Active".
Can I re-assign drive letters in Disk Management and delay the change until the next boot? This is just a guess, but it makes sense that the feature might exist. In other words, after the clone, can I change the drive letter ("C") of the current drive to something such as "T" and the SSD drive's letter to "C" and then the change will be effective upon the next boot? The hard drive has a second partition that is empty and is the "D:". It will be confusing for others to have the SSD partition as "C:" and the first partition some other letter and the second partition as "D:" but I understand and I am the only one that will use it. That is a minor detail.
I do not intend to use the old Windows after the successful clone unless I need to remove the SSD for return to ASUS. My new computer had a bad motherboard when I received it but I hope I do not need to return it again.
I know that some people will suggest that I do a fresh install. (I see: Clean Install Windows 10 Directly without having to Upgrade First - Windows 10 Forums.). I want to avoid doing that if possible. I am not sure that I can install everything else that ASUS installs but hopefully that is possible. If however I can simply swap drive letters after the clone then that should be the simplest solution.
I upgraded my PC from W8.1 to W10, all went very smooth. I then worked on upgrading a laptop SSD drive to from W8.1 to W10 which I planned to then install in my wife's laptop. It was easier for me to upgrade the drive on my PC then swap the drives than take her laptop for awhile. Well...that created my problem. I had 2 drive C's on my PC.
I was able to boot quite a few times between the drives (swapping the primary drive in BIOS). But then W10 "fixed" my drives, and now I have only one C drive (the SSD laptop drive) and my original C drive is now F. My PC now only boots to the SSD C drive and I'm not able to use Disk Mgmt to swap the letters. Disconnecting the SSD drive stops the PC from booting because the original C drive is F.
How to either swap the drive letters or remove the SSD drive and somehow be able to rename the F drive to C.
No matter what I do Windows always labels my secondary TV screen as my PC screen and vice versa. It's not really a problem in terms of functionality but it does annoy me that I can't change it. I've been through countless televisions and GPU's over the years but it always remains so possibly there is a good reason for it?
Anyway, the 'issue' has been persistent since W7 (and possibly before?) but I'm wondering if there is now/or always has been a work around for this?
Edit: This post explains it better Changing monitor identities?
I have some harddrives on a "server" computer in my home-network running win 7. From my "client" running windows 10 I am mounting these drives using
psexec server -u username -p password -d net share F=F: /GRANT:user,Full /GRANT:media,read 2>nul net use F: serverF
Today my client crashed and I had to remove the graphics card. Since then I cannot enter my network drives anymore, the commands seem to run, but when I try accessing the drives I get a message indicating I should put a media into these drives. Also, I cannot mount them manually using "map network drive" since the drive letters are not available.
I tried removing them from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMMountedDevices (they are listed there as "DosDevicesF" etc.), but once I restart, they are there (in the registry) again.
how I could fix this? Win10 somehow seems to remember that thes drives once have been there before and keeps blocking the drive letters...
My new windows 10 only sees my PC - when searching for my files in Explorer, it cannot 'see' my two external drives when I plug them in. I've looked in Device Manager and they are not showing in there either. How can I tell Win 10 to access my external drives?
I thought Win 10 would automatically spot my external drivers the moment I plugged them in? Then it would go search for and install the appropriate drivers - but it isn't doing that..
For some reason, ever since i built my computer back in late 2014, it has been going very slow. Programs take awhile to start up and the initial boot takes about 5-7 minutes. However, all the games I play run very well. I actually overclock both my CPU and GPU with low temps. My specs are as follows:
GPU: AMD Gigabyte R9 270 w/ 2gigs vRAM CPU: AMD FX 6300 OC'd to 4.0GHz RAM: 8gigs of 1333MHz DDR3 Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3P PSU: Sentey 725w
Edit: I forgot to mention that the USB 3.0 ports rarely work. This has been a problem ever since I got the mobo. I will probably just call Gigabyte at some point if no is able to figure that out
Sometimes when turning pc on I get a popup saying input signal out of range change settings to 1600x900-60hz and when pc comes on everything is magnified then after rebooting several times screen returns to normal?
windows 10 installed major updates this morning now I cannot get onto the internet via my range extender this has always been intermittent in the past but could get it to work eventually I have run the connection diagnostics and its telling me there are components missing and will not connect?
if I move rooms so that I am directly linked to the router instead of the extender everything works fine.
I'm using static IP for Network #1 which is 192.168.1.110
But when I try joining another network let's say network #2 with a router address like 192.168.43.1 i have to change network settings and use another static IP 192.168.43.10
Can't i just ask windows to use static IP 192.168.1.110 when i try to connect to network #1 and 192.168.43.10 when I connect to network #2 without having to manually configure it every time ?
I really have to use static IPs when connecting to those two particular networks...
When I try to dump the stack I input the command dps ffffd00026876000 ffffd00026870000. The two values are my base and limit values. I tripple checked them many times.
However everytime I input that command I get an error message saying
"^ Range error in 'dps ffffd00021787000 ffffd00021781000"...
By default .cur and .ani cursor files are not associated with opening by any program, and a thumbnail of the pic contents is displayed in the file explorer icons. When I assign a program for opening the file (ThumbsPlus, ACDSee, RealWorld Cursor Editor, whatever), the contents thumbnail changes to that program's icon. No more thumbnail or preview in the pane either. The only way I can get the thumbnail to return is to go to settings and Reset all default apps (which de-assigns those file types back to no program association).
Workaround is I use the "open with" menu command and make SURE I uncheck the "Always use this app to open...." box.
This does not happen to .jpg, .png, .ico or any other graphic type file. They all show thumbnails no matter what the program association. Only .cur / .ani.
Is this something we live with in Win 10? ...or am I "special"? I don't remember seeing this on Win 7, XP or any in history.
The pic below shows the thumbnails with "Opens with: Unknown application". As soon as I assign, no more thumbnail...
I'm having some troubles with my VPN at the moment, and customer supports staff has told me to "change your default gateway / network DHCP range in your router to..." How do I do this?
It's extremely difficult to assign default programs (either no option for "default" or it just doesn't take my choice) for different media, but once assigned, Win10 later forgets the default program and opens it with another.I have assigned all audio file types (mp3, wav, m3u etc.) to open with Winamp. I've done this by manually assigning a default program for every single file type in "Control Panel - Default Programs - Associate a file type...", because every other option failed.
Later, after a reboot, it still shows "Winamp" in the list of file types. But Win10 now opens m3u-files with VLC player! I'm going hardcore, with registry keys etc - only need the info. some file types are not listed under "Control Panel - Default Programs - Associate a file type...". How can i assign these missing file types to a program?
When I was running Windows 7, my system had a small solid state C drive that did not have enough space for windows 10 upgrade. I got a larger 2TB regular hard disk and used the manufacturer's software to clone the old Windows-7 SSD C drive to the new 2TB and then upgraded to Windows 10.
Now under windows 10, when go into defrag, the C Drive shows as a Solid State drive and of course windows does not want to optimize it.
The new drive definitely is not SSD. I assume somehow that setting was cloned from the old disk.
Is there either a way to change the C drive to a regular "hard disk drive" or force windows to defrag what it thinks is a SSD?
Problem: When I click on my H: drive or try to access it from the command line, it gives me an access denied error. However, all of the applications that I have installed on that drive run without issue. So, there is some access there. (See attached images. The first shows the hard drive state in diskmanager and in windows explorer. The second image shows the minecrafter launcher profile (that it is stored in H: and the application running, proving that there is some access.
System: Home built PC: (C:) 240GB SSD for OS, (E:) 1TB HDD for file storage and backup, (H:) 1TB HDD for large applications and video editing files. All drives are Simple, Basic, and none have encryption. All use the SATA connectors.
Process: I had Windows 7 Home 64 bit with, among many other things, Comodo Internet Security, Virtualbox, ImageDisk. During the upgrade process, I noticed that Windows 10, during the upgrade, ran the file system check and fix "problems" on the H: drive.
(Side note) Having forgotten to uninstall Comodo before the upgrade, I did not have network after the upgrade. The fix was non-trivial as I had to use a second computer to download the unofficial comodo uninstaller. Reboot. Uninstall the network devices. Reboot. And once Windows 10 was up and running, it reinstalled the network devices and the network was available.
Still, whether before or after the Comodo uninstall and reinstall, the uninstall of ImageDisk, or the uninstall of the Virtualbox network device, I have no access to the H: drive.
I was moving video files (AVI) from an external backup drive (WD Element) to another external backup drive (Seagate expansion) after having moved another video file from my laptop (Acer) to that Seagate external drive. The night before I had moved some video files from the WD to the Seagate with no problem but using a different laptop (Sony). These video files are all rather large and I can tell that the space is still being allocated on the Seagate because while the folder cannot be seen the space that was there is still being used by the Seagate because I am missing over 100GB which would be about the size of that now missing folder.
What happened was there was a message that the Seagate drive could not be recognized while the files were in the process of being moved to that drive from the WD. This is after I had already moved a video file of about 26GB with no problem into that now missing folder. When I saw the message I attempted several times to move files to that Seagate drive but I could not so I unplugged the Seagate drive from that laptop (Acer) then reinserted it into the usb port. I got a repair message that said it needed to be repaired because some files were corrupted and that no data would be lost but the drive would be unavailable during the repairs so I checked ok. It took only about 30 seconds and it said the repairs were completed and the drive was available but I noticed that the folder that I was moving the video files to was not gone.
As I stated there are more than 100GB of files in that folder some are video and others are audio recordings that were created by using the myrecording (audio and video) features of the Acer laptop and they are very important so I need to figure out if they can be retrieved from that Seagate drive. I have not copied anything else onto that Seagate drive but I have plugged it into the Acer computer to ensure it is being recognized. Both the external drives WD and Seagate are plug and play that are powered from the usb -- they have no power adapters.
Pen Drive and external hard drive keep getting errors! So I select to fix the problem scandrive recommended scan and repair. But there's never anything wrong with them it reports! And it takes ages to scan it takes 10-15 minutes for 32GB pen drive. Windows 7 Pro done it in a flash! Anything I can do about it.
I have just set up a mirror drive(software RAID1) and want to change the drive letter. I am getting a message "The parameter is incorrect". I am wondering if I am stuck with the one assigned when the mirror drive was set up.
So when you click All apps, you get an alphabetical list. If you have more than two programs installed, scrolling through it becomes cumbersome.A friend from the Insider program mentioned clicking on the title letters in the list, which wasn't at all obvious, and that produces a list of all the title letters, and enables you to jump to the letter of interest... if you know it [1]. But it takes three clicks to get to the list... Start / All Apps / A (or whatever).
Is there any way to reduce the number of clicks to get to that title letters index?Or am I better off to install Classic Start Menu, once it is working for Windows 10?
So, I got a new DELL XPS 13 last night and on my other computer, I used to do alt+164 to get the "n" but on this computer it does not work. I also tried Ctrl +~+n and that did not work either.
Is there a setting I have to activate? I already have the "Spanish Keyboard" installed but I don't think that makes a difference...I'd just like to know the list of keyboard commands
