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Nazo
2[H]4U
- Joined
- Apr 2, 2002
- Messages
- 3,672
A short while back, for no real reason I'm aware of (I don't think ANYTHING has changed in my system setup -- certainly I can't think of anything in any way harddrive or partition related unless it was the removal of Acronis tools, but I would swear this issue occurred well after that...) Windows XP on my minimal computer suddenly decided to see and mount partitions it's supposed to ignore. I have a Linux EXT4 partition as well as a swap partition, and while Windows normally utterly ignores such partitions, it has all of a sudden randomly decided to assign drive letters to them. I've also just recently added a hidden FAT32 partition where I keep some data for various live linux distros and Windows is assigning a letter to it as well. I think I remember that Windows is supposed to show hidden partitions with NT versions now, but it won't let me change anything. Neither the Linux partitions, nor the hidden FAT32 partition can be adjusted in any way in the "Computer Management" section of the Administrative Tools. (I was hoping to just remove the mount point entirely. I don't want it assigning drive letters to these partitions in the first place.) It's odd that it won't even let me change the one for the hidden FAT32 partition though even though it at least knows the filesystem well enough that I can see the files and everything. Interestingly enough, it manages to offer the option to change the drive letter for my Windows partition, so at least I can say the Computer Manager isn't completely broken (not that changing anything there would be very beneficial...)
So I googled around and found out where Windows keeps the mount points in the registry, then deleted each of the values for the drive letters. Upon a reboot, they were right back where they were before. I tried assigning them to invalid things so Windows would see them there and maybe stop mounting when it failed, but it just assigned new letters to them just as if I had deleted. The only single thing I can do is reassign them to letters I use less often. This is pretty annoying on its own. I also recently changed partitions around to fix something and of course I had to do this all over again because Windows assigns them based on IDs and the IDs changed. Just to be especially annoying, it assigns them letters before many drives such as my optical drive (well, to be fair, I'm using a virtual drive since this computer doesn't have an optical drive at all, so it might be acquiring the virtual optical drive later on after it sees the harddrive -- but it uses an actual driver and everything that is loaded very early in the startup process, so it shows up very early on really.) Of course, anything USB gets pushed way out there until I reassign the letters on the partitions it shouldn't be mounting, then reassign the USB drive back to where it should be. (Kind of a pain to get used to the USB drives always showing up on one particular letter, then suddenly it's some random letter you'd least expect.)
Once the partitions it shouldn't be mounting are assigned letters I never use it's not so bad, but I'd really rather they weren't there at all. They really shouldn't be taking up any of my drive letters, even if I do have plenty to work with atm. Also, it's annoying that if I change partitions around it will do this all over again. I had to google around all over again to find where the key was again. There's just no reason Windows should be mounting partitions it normally would more or less pretend didn't even exist.
So I googled around and found out where Windows keeps the mount points in the registry, then deleted each of the values for the drive letters. Upon a reboot, they were right back where they were before. I tried assigning them to invalid things so Windows would see them there and maybe stop mounting when it failed, but it just assigned new letters to them just as if I had deleted. The only single thing I can do is reassign them to letters I use less often. This is pretty annoying on its own. I also recently changed partitions around to fix something and of course I had to do this all over again because Windows assigns them based on IDs and the IDs changed. Just to be especially annoying, it assigns them letters before many drives such as my optical drive (well, to be fair, I'm using a virtual drive since this computer doesn't have an optical drive at all, so it might be acquiring the virtual optical drive later on after it sees the harddrive -- but it uses an actual driver and everything that is loaded very early in the startup process, so it shows up very early on really.) Of course, anything USB gets pushed way out there until I reassign the letters on the partitions it shouldn't be mounting, then reassign the USB drive back to where it should be. (Kind of a pain to get used to the USB drives always showing up on one particular letter, then suddenly it's some random letter you'd least expect.)
Once the partitions it shouldn't be mounting are assigned letters I never use it's not so bad, but I'd really rather they weren't there at all. They really shouldn't be taking up any of my drive letters, even if I do have plenty to work with atm. Also, it's annoying that if I change partitions around it will do this all over again. I had to google around all over again to find where the key was again. There's just no reason Windows should be mounting partitions it normally would more or less pretend didn't even exist.