Drive Letter Assignments Reverting after Reboot
 

Topic says it all. In my setup, I prefer the CD and DVD drives to be assigned drive letters at the end. I assigned "Z" to my built-in laptop DVD ROM drive, and "W" to my Alcohol 120% virtual drive.

The problem with this is, the drive letters revert to E: and F: respectively, after a reboot. I have tried uninstalling the drivers and disabling the virtual drive. I also tried logging in as "Administrator", and changing the settings, but the changes do not stick. The new assignments are only valid right between the time I changed the drive letters up until the next reboot.

Help?

When you say that you change the settings do you mean that you went into Administrative Tools -> Computer Management and changed the letter designation from there? This is what I did when I wanted to change the letters of my drives

Correct. I wouldn't know of any easier way to do this.

I change it via Computer Management applet under Administrative Tools, but the change doesn't stick past shutdown.

Bump. It's still happening. Anybody?

I could always surrender and leave Drives E and F free for these recalcitrant drives, but I don't wanna :(

Anything suspicious in the event log?

Check your BIOS and see if there is a setting similar to "Plug and Play OS" and see if it is enabled. It sounds like your BIOS is set to issue drive mapping and is overwriting the OS settings.

BIOS is disabled as soon the operating system switches to protected mode. Then all communication with the hardware is done through system drivers. Therefore it is technically impossible for the BIOS to overwrite OS settings (also consider that the BIOS doesn't have any information about the filesystem on the harddrive - driver code for NTFS write access would be much too large to fit into the BIOS).

I doubt this is a hardware problem. See if you can uninstall all CD/DVD emulation software and then switch the drive letters, reboot and look if they still revert to the old settings.

BIOS has no such setting, I'm afraid. Nothing untoward in the Event Log either.

Uninstalling the emulation software and switching drive letters were futile as well, unfortunately.

I did notice that certain external drives kept the reassigned drive letters, while the internal one didn't. I guess I lose :p I don't know what the heck is going on, why the heck it is going on, and I don't wish to reformat just to be able to rearrange drive assignments at my leisure.

At any rate, guys, I appreciate the recommendations!

I have the same problem: My DVD (Write) W: drive resets to F: on reboot, while my CD (Read) R: drive retains its drive letter assignment.

I had it fixed for a few days, but now it is happening again. The cause? A bad NVIDIA driver. Either an NForce (4.62, 5.10, or 6.86) or the ForceWare 93.71.

I'm weary of tracking it down, so I'm just leaving things as they are.

I have the same problem too. I first noticed it after installing Copernic Desktop Search. This program conflicts with Nvidia's Desktop Manager. I'm using a GeForce FX Go5200.

I got rid of NVidia's DeskTop Manager, but that didn't help. (I've had Copernic Agent v6.12 installed for years.) Getting rid of NVidia's Display driver did the trick. I used the Window's Update replacement. (Normally I don't trust them, either, but that was what I was using before, so I knew it worked.)

I'm using a very old GeForce3 (2001), so there is a generic problem @ NVidia.

Foxfire

I've uninstalled my NVidia drivers, and updated to 9792 with a modified INF from LaptopVideo2Go. For now, it seems to fix the problem.

As per foxfire55423's posts, updating drivers only work for a few days, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed! Thanks for the heads up, at any rate!