W10 changing drive letters after reboot

Question

Following on from a previous thread identified couple of years ago, [windows-10-changing-assigned-drive-letters-after-reboot][1], STILL A PROBLEM, MUST BE FIXED. I depend on drive letters being what they are CONSISTENTLY. They are "assigned" through my disk manager FOR A REASON. It was an issue with W7 Pro x64, it is still an issue with W10 Pro x64. Big fail where this is concerned, Microsoft, for not having addressed or corrected this behavior for so many years. [1]: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/bf8f6de4-d600-49e0-ba85-7db2557ef8af/windows-10-changing-assigned-drive-letters-after-reboot

Answer 1

Big fail where this is concerned, Microsoft, for not having addressed or corrected this behavior for so many years

If it were a widespread problem then MS would surely have corrected it, due to the volume of complaints. Their own internal developers would have experienced it too.

I have a laptop with the standard C: drive. I also have an SD card slot that I set as the E: drive. It's drive letter has never changed. Logic would indicate that there must be something unique to your hardware or environment or maybe a wayward registry setting somewhere.

I don't know if we can fix it, but I can try to help you troubleshoot it and see if we can isolate the problem.

What kind of drive is it, HDD, SSD, external USB drive? Does it just get assigned the next drive letter? (IE: you set it to E: but it gets changed to D:)

Is your PC/userid a member of an Active Directory domain that might have a logon script assigned? If you logon with a different, local account after a reboot do you see the same behavior?

Have you reviewed the system eventlog for any disk related events?

Refer to: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/3bf1ab4a-a165-4f18-b15d-8471c95c381e/where-in-registry-are-the-paths-of-mounted-volumes-stored

Running the Mountvol command I can see my E: drive.

   \\?\Volume{f882df2a-c164-11e5-826a-d09c2071b6b1}\  
        E:\  

That shows up in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices

Do you see your volume and do the registry entries change/disappear after a reboot?

To try to find who/what is doing this, we will can run Process monitor. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon

You will have to enable boot logging, and make sure that "process name is system" is not being excluded in the filter. Then reboot. Log back on and immediately run procmon and stop the trace. Then search the entries for that registry key and see if you can make any sense of what is going on at that time. Ex: Are services being stated? Is a scheduled task being executed.

I realize that this is not a trivial exercise but you are effectively looking for the proverbial "needle in a haystack".

Answer 2

I routinely run with anywhere from 3+ USB sticks, external drives, etc, all connected. And, yes, has been a LONG standing problem, since at least Windows 7 Pro.

Answer 3

@Michael W. Powell
Hi,
Sorry for the inconvenience.
You can use the Feedback Hub app to share your problem.

Here are some posts with the similar issue with yours, just for your reference, you can try the method mentioned in them:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-hardware/repeated-loss-of-drive-letter-assignment-upon/6dd6edb7-250e-46c2-9f31-05d4ed5db4a5

Hope above information can help you.

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Answer 4

In the Windows 10 , open start and search for feedback and open the Feedback Hub app and report this issue. Make sure add all relevant log files and screenshot for the issue too.