What's with all these drive letters?

corblimey

Right now, Windows explorer (Win XP SP2) is showing drive letters, C:, , E:, F:. That's all fine, it's my regular hard drive, a recovery partition installed by HP, my DVD player and my DVD writer. Sorted.

However, it also shows H: I: J: and K:. K: is a drive I sometimes use with Virtual Daemon Manager to mount ISOs, but I also use P:, so why doesn't that show? There's nothing mounted on either right now, and hasn't been in some time. H:, I:, and J: are unknown to me. Clicking on them just gives the regular "Insert a disk into drive X:" message. I also have an external HD connected up and that's on N:, but that doesn't show. Finally, if I click on 'Safely remove hardware' on my taskbar, it gives me the option of removing N: (my external HD) or removing H: I: J: and O: (all on 1 line, incidentally, I can't just remove H:)

So what's the story? Are H: I: J: and O: simply old drive letters that were assigned when I plugged in some unknown USB device? Is there any harm in disconnecting them via the 'safely remove hardware' option? Can I get Windows just to clean the whole drive letter assignment thing up and reset everything as it should be C: to F: and the USB hard drive on G:?

mukki

corblimey wrote: »

Right now, Windows explorer (Win XP SP2) is showing drive letters, C:, , E:, F:. That's all fine, it's my regular hard drive, a recovery partition installed by HP, my DVD player and my DVD writer. Sorted.

However, it also shows H: I: J: and K:. K: is a drive I sometimes use with Virtual Daemon Manager to mount ISOs, but I also use P:, so why doesn't that show? There's nothing mounted on either right now, and hasn't been in some time. H:, I:, and J: are unknown to me. Clicking on them just gives the regular "Insert a disk into drive X:" message. I also have an external HD connected up and that's on N:, but that doesn't show. Finally, if I click on 'Safely remove hardware' on my taskbar, it gives me the option of removing N: (my external HD) or removing H: I: J: and O: (all on 1 line, incidentally, I can't just remove H:)

So what's the story? Are H: I: J: and O: simply old drive letters that were assigned when I plugged in some unknown USB device? Is there any harm in disconnecting them via the 'safely remove hardware' option? Can I get Windows just to clean the whole drive letter assignment thing up and reset everything as it should be C: to F: and the USB hard drive on G:?

pc probably has a built in memory card reader, might be hidden behind a sliding panel

Overheal

in my experience all safely remove hardware does is check to see if there are any open handles between the device and the pc, it doesnt even appear to try and Stop Them, even though thats what it claims its doing.

If you want the device gone and you know what device it is, go to the device manager and just right-click to disable it.

corblimey

mukki wrote: »

pc probably has a built in memory card reader, might be hidden behind a sliding panel

Yeah, there's a whole bunch of card readers at the front of the PC that I've never used. That's mostly why I'm not comfortable with messing with it much in case I accidentally shut one of them down and can't get it back.

Overheal wrote: »

If you want the device gone and you know what device it is, go to the device manager and just right-click to disable it.

Er, what device? It's a drive letter that doesn't appear to be in use...

Overheal

H I J and O appear to be from a card reader; at least thats normally the case. Doesnt seem to matter which way you go about it - internal and external multi-format card readers will all do the same thing: the system requires a seperate driver for each slot, and so treats each as its own drive. So for example H might be the Flash Drive while J is the SD/MS drive. If the memory card reader is not in use, again, you can disable the collection of drives in the device manager if you dont want to see it in my computer all the time.