Drive letter remains after USB drive unplugged

[johngie]

I have three individually named USB external drives that I connect to my computer. The fixed drives are A, C, D and E so the first available drive letter is F. When I plug in the drive that I've assigned to F (using Disk Management) it takes that letter and all is well. When I first started doing this, unplugging the drive would make that letter (F) available again, so if I plugged in that drive it would take the letter F again.

Now it doesn't do that. Each time I plug in again, it increments by one so it becomes G, then H and so on. It no longer "releases" its previous drive letter for re-use. Rebooting the computer resets it back to F but the same behaviour then repeats, i.e. incrementing each time. I get exactly the same behaviour from all other USB drives and from a memory card reader, so it's not a function of the drive hardware.

Someone previously suggested deleting the entire data from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices]

but that seems very drastic. If I do delete all the data from that key, what will happen? Am I likely to have an unusable computer?

johngie

[Mini123]

Personally if you do attempt to delete that key you should make a backup of the registry

Why do you want specific letters anyway?

My one at work assigns my drive as either E or D then when I get home it is H and all of my programs and shortcuts work

[liquidguru]

are you unplugging your drives using the 'safely remove hardware', or just pulling out the usb cable?

you could always run Process Explorer (link) and search for F: to see if any process is holding on to your drive

Edited May 29, 2006 by liquidguru

[LLXX]

I think you can fix the drive letter by going to the device manager and setting the properties for the USB drive, while it is plugged in.