Other External products

[tommy79]

When I plug my Black Armor drive into a USB port (Win XP OS) two drive letters are assigned, one for a CD drive and another for a hard disk drive.  It is my understanding that the CD drive letter assignment has to do with the software for unlocking the drive.  Once that's done, another letter is assigned for accessing the Black Armor's hard drive.

My problem is, the CD-ROM letter assignments stay after the Black Armor drive is unplugged.  Every time I plug in the Black Armor drive, I get another assignment.  Right now four drive letters are occupied with phantom CD-ROM drives.  The only way I have found to make them go away is to reboot the computer.  Is anyone else having this problem?  Any solutions?

Edit:  The phantom CD-ROM drives do not show up in Disk Management, but they show as assigned in Windows Explorer.

Message Edited by tommy79 on 06-11-2009 02:11 PM

[Seiryu]

The CD-rom drive is actually supposed to disappear when you unlock the drive. When you plug the drive in, it normally appears as a CD only, then "disconnects" the CD and changed to a drive.

open a command prompt and type: mountvol /r

this may fix it.

[tommy79]

I tried your suggestion.  First I plugged the Black Armor in and unlocked it.  The drive part was assigned O: and the CD-ROM part got K:.  The K: persisted after the O: was assigned.  I used the "safely remove hardware" tool to disconnect the O:.  The K: letter does not show up in the tool.  Then I unplugged the drive.  The K: disappeared briefly, then came back.

The mountvol /r command produced the following:

C:\Documents and Settings\admin1>mountvol /r
Creates, deletes, or lists a volume mount point.

MOUNTVOL [drive:]path VolumeName
MOUNTVOL [drive:]path /D
MOUNTVOL [drive:]path /L

    path        Specifies the existing NTFS directory where the mount
                point will reside.
    VolumeName  Specifies the volume name that is the target of the mount
                point.
    /D          Removes the volume mount point from the specified directory.
    /L          Lists the mounted volume name for the specified directory.

Possible values for VolumeName along with current mount points are:

    \\?\Volume{24701778-013b-11da-ba03-806d6172696f}\
        D:\

    \\?\Volume{24701779-013b-11da-ba03-806d6172696f}\
        C:\

    \\?\Volume{2470177a-013b-11da-ba03-806d6172696f}\
        E:\

    \\?\Volume{8509302a-d98e-11da-bc0f-0011954ff655}\
        A:\

    \\?\Volume{2470177b-013b-11da-ba03-806d6172696f}\
        F:\

    \\?\Volume{2470177c-013b-11da-ba03-806d6172696f}\
        G:\

    \\?\Volume{2470177d-013b-11da-ba03-806d6172696f}\
        H:\

    \\?\Volume{2470177e-013b-11da-ba03-806d6172696f}\
        I:\
 

The K: assignment does not show up in the mountvol command output, but still appears  in the "My Computer" window.  Also, new assignments to it are definitely blocked.

Thanks for your suggestion.  This is off topic, but can you tell me how to put images in posts?  The insert image box asks for an URL.  Do the images have to be hosted somewhere other than this forum?

[Seiryu]

The /R option may not be available on your operating system; I am using Windows Vista™ Ultimate and it provides a lot more options than your XP output. At this point, I am not sure what else could be causing your problem. Perhaps you could right click on the drive, hit Properties, then "Hardware" tab to see what driver the letter is assigned to...

You are correct, images must be hosted offsite. I use Photobucket to host images. You could try TinyPic (tinypic.com), a lite version of Photobucket.

[tommy79]

I looked in the Properties for the drive letter.  The CD-ROM seems to be a phantom.  Zero bytes for size, zero bytes in use.  There doesn't appear to be any hardware associated with it.  The hardware tab shows the drive for C:, four devices for a multi-slot card reader, a floppy drive and the DVD writer.  Attempts to open the CD-ROM drive letter produce a message box with an error message: "K:\ refers to a location that is unavailable."  All it seems to do is block anything else from using the drive letter until I reboot the computer.

I have a Desktop and a laptop machine.  The problem is happening on the Desktop.  The Black Armor drive works ok on the laptop.  I found a drive letter management program that I hope will allow me to keep the Black Armor drive letter assignments isolated towards the last letters of the alphabet.  I'm thinking that there might be another process running on the Desktop that is causing this.  I might try selectively turning processes off to see if I can find which one is at fault, if any.  Thanks for your help.  If I come up with anything, I will post it here.