Windows changed the letter of my disk drive and all the files on my playlist are unreadable
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hey guys, this an annoying problem, and before I have to do something drastic, I wanted to see if anyone had some advice.
So I use like 7 hard drives for file management and the usual jerk off playlist I use is a VLC playlist I've been managing for years, and one the disk drives I use is named "[DISK NAME]D:)", this is a big boy, it needs to be connected to a power outlet, is 10TB and has 2 smaller 4TB disks attached through USB ports, which used to have the letters E and F assigned to them.
Today we had a 2 hour power outage and when the power came back, the letters assigned to the external HDD got all jumbled, the main one became F and the other 2 other letters.
I tried changing them back to the usual letters through disk management, but letter D is not available, as if taken by a phantom drive.
and because the letters changed, my VLC playlist is unusable. it had roughly 10k files in it from all 3 HDDs and putting it back together is impossible, and starting over is looking like a pain in the ass.
has anyone dealt with a similar issue? is there a way to rollback to a previous state? -
The playlist may be the least of your problems. It could be that that drive got a sudden power-spike when power came back on and is gone. Did you swtch them all off?
Try to assign a letter that would still be available like "Z" If that works and you can see the contents it's something else. -
@krisu50 disconnect all external drives, press winkey+R and run
devmgmt.msc
go to "View" in the menu and enable "show hidden devices"
in the list look for "disk drives" and uninstall everything that is greyed out
restart the PC, open the disk manager and see if it reports any drive using the letters -
@eonflux yeah, first thing I checked was to see if the drives were ok, they are. they just got the assigned drive letter changed automatically
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@ianfontinell thanks! I'll try that and report back
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There is a fix for this...
Right click your Start Menu, then click "Disk Management"
When the list of drives comes up, you'll be able to click on the drive itself (on the left) or the partition, then click "Change Drive Letter and Paths"
You may have to change each drive more than once to do a little magic shuffling of the drive letters, but this is where you absolutely CAN change them back.
If the disk management won't let you use the drive letter because it claims it's already in use, even though it's not, there's a solution for that too.
Click the Start Menu, then type "cmd" (without the quotes) then press the LEFT CTRL + LEFT SHIFT + ENTER
When prompted by UAC, click "Yes"
Then, give the command prompt the following command
mountvol /r
Let the process run, then it should be clear, then reboot your PC.
IF it STILL does NOT want to let you use that drive letter, then you'll need to go in for a bit of a surgical removal, in which case, follow these steps
Click the Start Menu, then type "regedit" (without the quotes) and press ENTER
You'll want to look under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices\
Look for entries that say \DosDevices\D: (or whatever drive letter(s) it won't release) then right click it and click "Delete"
Once the phantom entries are gone, simply reboot your PC, and you'll be back in business
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@MrMazda YES SIRREE BOB'S YOUR UNCLE!
I had to unplug all drives, restart the machine, plug every drive back in and do some letter shuffling, but all drives are back to their proper letters!
thank you all! -
K krisu50 has marked this topic as solved
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@krisu50 Just to be sure that there's no other underlaying issue, you may want to open an elevated command prompt then run two simple commands, but they will take some time.
To open an elevated command prompt, click the start menu, type "cmd" (without the quotes), then press LEFT CTRL + LEFT SHIFT + ENTER and when UAC prompts you, click "Yes".
Once the elevated command prompt is open, run the following commands one right after the other:
DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth
sfc /scannow
When both commands have run fully, reboot your PC. This should eliminate any other surprise issues that you may have. If you really want to go balls to the wall, before you reboot, also run a third command:
chkdsk /R /F C :
There is no space between the C and the : I just put one in because otherwise it gave me an emoji. Also, since it is your primary OS drive, it will ask you if you want to do this upon reboot. When it does, choose YES.
This will ensure that every stitch of your system is checked out from top to bottom to make sure there's nothing else underlying in the system that may screw with things later.
You can also run the last of those 3 commands on the other drive letters as well. Just be aware though that when running the command on other drives, it WILL make the system unmount the drive before doing the scan, and if the drive is particularly large, it WILL take some time. If you're experiencing any other side issues though, it absolutely will address them.
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