Windows 7 losing drive letters

darich

Hi

This happened for the second time today (first time was a couple of days ago).

Today I was using the computer and downloaded around 100photos I took last night at a party. Every thing downloaded as normal I viewed them in adobe bridge (raw files), converted to jpg and posted a few on facebook. All was normal.

Then later on 2 drive drive letters were gone. No sign of any of the images or mp3s that were on that drive or another.

It's a laptop (HP) and it came with a 500gb HDD. I split into 3 with C being around 92gb, D and E being dvd rom and virtual dvd respectively.
F and G were something like 100gb and 300gb respectively.

F had around 50-60gb of mp3 and music videos, while G had a few folders of photos and a load or movies ripped from my own dvd collection.

Today when both F and G disappeared, all the mp3s, music videos, photos and ripped movies are not listed. "My Computer" is listing only C as a local disk. No F drive. No G drive.
The other night when it happened the G drive disappeared and I had to use a software recovery program to recover my files. Some were lost but since I have the dvd movies I wasn't too fussed. After I had recovered everything I made another copy on another machine.

Today it's the same again, but with 2 letters gone. Thankfully with the short time between the two I can recover most things from the other machine, but I can't recover the images I downloaded today...unless the software recovery works.

When I reassign a letter to the drive shows as empty. Interestingly, although 2 seperate drives have disappeared today, the drive space only shows up as one area so when I assign a letter to it, it's one drive - so 2 disappear and then when reassigned a letter, both have merged into one.

The machine is a few months old, maybe a year but it's not all that old.
I'm running win7 (64bit)
The partitions were created using windows originally then I downloaded Minitool Partition Home Wizard (free program and have had it installed for something like 4months - no problems.) I used MPHW a few times to adjust the size of partitions to suit my needs. Again a few months ago and no problems.

I'm ok with computers and can figure most things out but this one's got me.
Nothing has changed between downloading the images today and the drive disappearing.

Any ideas what could cause a letter to disappear??
And how to stop it happening again?
If it does, is it possible to reassign a letter without losing the info on the drive???

thanks

davb

The drive letters as such are not important - what matters is what partitions show for the disk in disk management.
Does it show three or just one, and if just one, does it fill the entire disk.

darich

davb wrote: »

The drive letters as such are not important - what matters is what partitions show for the disk in disk management.
Does it show three or just one, and if just one, does it fill the entire disk.

Prior to the letter and drive disappearing the laptop showed
C, F and G with their respective sizes.

When the letter was lost for the first time earlier in the week, it simply showed that space as unallocated.

Today, when both letters disappeared, instead of 2 unallocated spaces, it showed one ie it's as if the two drives were merged into one.

davb

I have never seen or heard of partitions deleting themselves and then their space merged with another partition.
Unless this has been done by some program, then all I can think of is the partition table being corrupted.

darich

assuming it's the partition table, how do i check this and then fix it if there's a problem?

davb

I would back up anyting important asap, then you could do a chkdsk /r from 'safe mode with command prompt' (F8 on boot).
I think if it were mine, then my confidence in the system after losing partitions twice in a week would be very low, and I would be considering a full disk test/erase and reinstall

diable

Any reason why you have partitioned your drive as this slows the access time down?

sb2_2

Why was the drive partitioned? Unless it was to run a different operating system on, IMO I would get rid of it anyway as like diable said, it slows access time down.

With drive E, you said this was a virtual drive. To fix this would just need to restart the program you use to create it or maybe it removed itself from the list. If so, choose 'add new virtual drive'.