Cannot access the partition or volume because the drive letter missing? Here you can learn how to get your missing drive letter back in Windows 10/8/7.
By Cherry / Last Updated October 18, 2019
When you divided your hard disk into several partitions, you’ll give it a letter from A to Z. That is drive letter. It can be used to physical disk partition, floppy disk drive, removable device, CD-ROM, or network drive. Each storage drive should be assigned a drive letter. Once the drive letter missing, you cannot access the drive to get any information.
There are many situations of drive letter missing, and here we have list the top 5 situations:
1. Drive letter missing from Windows Explorer or My Computer
2. Drive letter disappear in Disk Management
3. Drive letter missing from the list of available drive letters
4. Drive letter disappear after reboot
5. Drive letter missing in map network drive
Here is a case of drive letter missing:
“How do I find a missing drive in Windows 7?
For various reasons, I have reinstalled Windows 7 from scratch. When I got to the point where I am telling the installer what I want to do with my hard drives (I have two huge ones) I formatted both hard drives. Now, after I have installed the Operating System, it only recognizes the one hard drive that I put the Operating System on, (the C drive). I guess it does not read from a reformatted drive that it has not written to. How do I fix it so that I can use the second drive?"
Actually, in many cases, drive letter missing is the main reason of hard drive is not showing up. Thus, it is necessary to find drive letter back.
It is urgent to get the drive letter back when you find it disappeared. For the case we mentioned above, you can do as following steps:
Locate Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management You will find every hard disk in the list below with names like Disk 0, Disk 1, Disk 2 etc. Find the missing Disk and add a Drive Letter, after this you will see your missing hard drive in My Computer.
Besides the case we mentioned, there are many other situations of drive letter missing. And for different situations, we provide different solutions. You can read on if the method won’t solve your situations.
If you find the drive letter suddenly missing in Windows Explorer or My Computer, you need to check whether it is hidden by you or others. If the drive letter is hidden, here you can do as following steps to get it back (take Windows 10 as an example):
1>. To configure your Folder Options in Windows 10, you’ll need to begin by opening up a window in File Explorer.
2>. Then, click on the top left hand File menu, and select Change folder and search options to get the Folder Options.
3>. Then, select the "View" tab, scroll down the slide handle to find the Show drive letters option in Advanced settings and check it, click OK.
After that, we can see the missing drive letters in Windows Explorer again.
If a partition is hidden and you cannot find it and access it, it is a good choice to turn to a third party software for help. The AOMEI Partition Assistant should be a great partition software that can make things go easier. If your computer is base on Windows Server 2003, 2008, 2012, 2016, 2019, the AOMEI Partition Assistant Server Edition can help you settle all partitions problems.
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Install AOMEI Partition Assistant to your computer based on Windows 10/8/7. it will show you all partitions on your computer no matter it is hidden or not. That means here you can clearly see whether your partition is hidden.
To unhide the partition, here you can do as follows:
Step 1. Right-click the hidden partition, select Advanced-> Unhide Partition.
Step 2. Click OK to unhide the selected partition. If the partition has no drive letter after unhiding, please restart your computer.
Step 3. Click Apply-> Proceed to execute the task.
After that, the missing drive letter will be back and you can access to the drive successfully.
For some situations, you may find that the hard drive is missing in Windows Explorer, and when you open Disk Management, you’ll find the drive is here but without any drive letter. Like the screenshot:
For this situation, you are unable to access the drive and get any information stored on the partition. Fortunately, you can get the drive letter back in Windows Disk Management:
Right-click the partition/volume whose drive letter missing, select Change Drive Letter and Paths and click Add... ->OK.
Using this method, you can assign a drive letter for the drive whose drive letter is missing.
Warning:
It is important to assign the drive with its original drive letter. Otherwise, the programs relying on the original drive letter might not work correctly. Thus, if the original drive letter has been taken by a new drive, you need to change the drive letter of the new hard drive for a new letter to get the drive letter back.
If you find the Change Drive Letter and Paths grayed out, you can also use the AOMEI Partition Assistant to assign drive letter to the partition.
Sometimes, you may find that the letter is not shown in the list of available drive letters but no drive was assigned with that letter. That may because the letter is reserved for a removable device that was removed or is hidden. For this situation, you can get the missing drive letter from Registry. Do as followings:
Tips: It is recommended to backup Registry before doing any modification in case of data loss or system crash.
1>. Launch Regedit, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices. Check whether there is a device is shown as being mounted at the specific drive letter.
2>. Then, right-click the drive letter that you want and chooseRename from the list menu, and change the letter to any other used letter to free up it.
Reboot the computer to assign the released letter to the drive you want.
Part of users may meet the problem that after reboot their PC, the drive letter missing. If the drive letter missing after every reboot, you can consider to wipe the hard drive and recreate partitions. And you can also use AOMEI Partition Assistant to wipe hard drive or secure erase SSD.
Tips: wipe hard drive or secure erase SSD will delete all data on the disk, thus, please copy disk or make a backup in advanced. Here we take wipe hard drive as an example:
Step 1. Right-click the hard drive that needs to be wiped, select Wipe Hard Drive.
Step 2. Here you can choose a wiping method. There are four methods you can choose, and here we choose Fill sectors with Zero. because besides this way, you need to upgrade to AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional for the other three ways.
Step 3. Finally, click Apply->Proceed to execute the progress.
After the whole progress, you can recreate partitions on the hard drive with Disk Management or AOMEI Partition Assistant.
Sometimes, you may find the local drive letters may disappear in Windows Explorer suddenly. That may because of the drive letter missing in map network drive. You may not check the option “Reconnect at logon”. For this situation, you just need to remap the network drive and check Reconnect at logon.
There are many reasons would cause drive letter missing. Hope that this article can help you to solve your problem. If you have any other good methods for settle this kind of problem, welcome to share it in the comments area.
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