# Second Hard drive loses drive letter at every reboot...ideas?



## Meinecke (Jun 30, 2017)

Hello...
I have a windows 7 pro 64 machine that has the strange behavior to lose drive d drive letter with every reboot
No suspicious logs in event viewer...
And google was not so helpful so far...
Any ideas?
Thx!!!


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

Assigning a permanent drive letter becomes important when sharing a drive on a network. There are several ways to do it.

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-assign-permanent-drive-letter-windows-10


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## Meinecke (Jun 30, 2017)

Hello...
Thx for the response...
It is win 7, but i checked the link and all the shown ideas/tips are already tried...
Even tried to script it, but for some reason, it wants it done through the Partition manager in Windows...
But more interesting would be, why that happenes...and how to stop it...
Never had that before


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

I've never encountered that. Admittedly I usually go about it the other way. I normally set the drive letter when I map a network drive.


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## Meinecke (Jun 30, 2017)

??
I dont lose a network drive...i lose a local hard drive letter...
The other machine in the network dont have that mounted as a drive...they only write to it on hard wired code


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

Meinecke said:


> ??
> I dont lose a network drive...i lose a local hard drive letter...
> The other machine in the network dont have that mounted as a drive...they only write to it on hard wired code


I understand that, but you could map a network drive if you wanted to, and you could do it even if you didn't share it after you created it. At least your drive letter would be set.


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## weaselfire (Feb 7, 2018)

Has it always done this or recently changed? Different possibilities for each.

Jeff


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## Meinecke (Jun 30, 2017)

Hello...
It started when the "new" drive got introduced and from that on, drive ltter D is getting lost on machine restarts without logs in even logs


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## tiffanysgallery (Jan 17, 2015)

It could be a number of things... I'd replace the drive cable first... see if that fixes it...

If that doesn't fix it... I'd reverse the drive cables between the two drives... see if that fixes it...

Go to command line and run chkdsk/f d:

If none of those other things fix it... try running Microsoft d frag to see if there's bad sectors...

If none of that works... run Microsoft update

It could also be a bios issue...

See if any of those work for ya and let us know.


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## Meinecke (Jun 30, 2017)

So...
Bios is updated, 
Windows is updated,
SFC/scannow and chckdsk/f are issue free
switching cables did also not the trick


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## tiffanysgallery (Jan 17, 2015)

Did you switch the cables between the drives?

If you did, and that didn't make a difference, I'd suspect it could be a drive controller board.

Have you tried that drive on another computer?

Has that drive ever actually come up in windows? If so, how are you getting it to come up?

Run diskpart on it and see what it tells you about that drive...

Are you sure that your bios is correctly identifying that hard disk configuration?

Lastly, Is there actually any useful information on that drive? If not, use diskpart to wipe and reinitialize that drive. 

By chance, did this disk come out of a linux computer?


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## Meinecke (Jun 30, 2017)

Yes...the disk was an "old" NAS (some kind of unix/linux derivate OS) drive, that got re-partitioned and formatted in windows to serve as data graveyard


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## tiffanysgallery (Jan 17, 2015)

In that case, did you go to diskpart and delete all existing partitions and recreate them?

If that doesn't work, you'll need to use Partition Magic on the drive to re-partition it or return the drive to a linux machine and delete the partitions there and bring it back to windows and create new partitions.


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## backwoodsman7 (Mar 22, 2007)

Do I understand correctly that the drive works fine until the machine is rebooted? If so, what do you have to do to make it work again?

what file system is on the drive?


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## Meinecke (Jun 30, 2017)

Well...when machine comes back without the drive letter, i go to windows create partition wizzard thing and add drive letter back...folders etc are still there...recreate shares and good to go...
Its NTFS


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