Vista Explorer won't remove Drive Icons when Drives Dismounted

My Vista Explorer won't remove drive icons once a drive has been
dismounted. Even if I physically remove a drive from the machine, Vista
Explorer just turns the pre-existing drive icon into an "Other" category
icon, placing a question mark on it and retaining the drive letter
allocation, thus precluding any other device from being assigned that
drive letter.

It does something very similar with external USB drives. If you plug in
a external USB drive and assign it a letter like "X:", which I do with
my USB drives so they stay the same letter when I move them from machine
to machine, the Vista Explorer will never give up that drive letter
again.

I think Vista Explorer is buggy when it comes to handling USB drive
labels. It seems to remember drive labels and allocates a drive letter
to each drive label, and subsequently refuses to release that drive
letter for use by any other device, even if the drive is subsequently
dismounted - and there is no way to delete that drive label/drive letter
allocation.

This is an absolute nightmare if you use a lot of different USB storage
devices. You can actually end up with multiple drive letter assignments
to the same hard drive device. I don't know how, but I've also got two
different drive letters allocated to my internal data drive (C: is
Vista, D: is XP and E: is Data).

I would add that Vista Computer Management show the hard drives
correctly. And this is strictly a Vista Explorer issue. I have XP on
this machine also and the XP Explorer is fine, showing all the drives
exactly as they should be. Its obviously not a hardware issue.

I've Googled this too death and found nothing. Does anyone know how to
fix this?

Ditto - same problem. Started when connecting a linux formatted drive to
my Vista 64 machine. Used a utility to assign drive letters etc, now
having since removed the hardware and uninstalled the utility, drive
letters persist.. with question marks on them. Driving me mad - ha
no-one had this problem (other than PhillFri?)... please help!

My situation was the same - it was that pesky Linux hard disk interface
driver (Ext2 IFS if I recall). In my case, once I removed the driver I
was able to clean things up. If I recall correctly, after uninstalling
the driver I went into my hard drive manager and made sure no drives
were manually assigned drive letters. Then after a reboot Vista
defaulted to its automatic drive assignment procedure.

bizvits;1359004 Wrote:
> Ditto - same problem. Started when connecting a linux formatted drive to
> my Vista 64 machine. Used a utility to assign drive letters etc, now
> having since removed the hardware and uninstalled the utility, drive
> letters persist.. with question marks on them. Driving me mad - ha
> no-one had this problem (other than PhillFri?)... please help!


--
phillfri
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