Removable disk does not appear in Windows Explorer.
| SYMPTOMS (When you): |
you may experience any of the following symptoms: |
| Create a new volume on a local disk |
an existing mapped network drive is no longer available in Windows Explorer |
| Plug in a removable disk with existing volumes |
the new drive is not available in Windows Explorer |
| Plug in a removable drive (for example, a USB floppy drive or PCMCIA flash card) |
the new drive appears in Windows Explorer, but when you open it the contents of the existing drive are displayed |
| Add a physical hard disk or CD-ROM drive to your computer |
the existing drive appears in Windows Explorer, but when you open it the contents of the new drive are displayed |
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After your computer starts, the network drive may be replaced by the new drive. |
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After you disconnect the new drive, the mapped network drive letter has the same logical drive letter that it had before you added the new drive. |
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You may receive the following error message when you start your computer:
'The local device name is already in use.' |
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NOTE: The new device (or drive) may appear in Device Manager or the Disk Management console. |
CAUSE:
This behavior occurs if you map a network drive to the first available drive letter after the drive letters for the local volumes and CD-ROM drives. When you install a new device or volume, Mount Manager, which assigns drive letters to volumes, does not recognize the mapped network drive and assigns the next available drive letter to the new device or volume. This causes a collision with the existing mapped network drive.
WORKAROUND:
To prevent this issue from occurring, when you map a network drive, assign the highest available drive letter to the mapped network drive.
To work around this issue if the new volume appears in Disk Management, specify a different drive letter for the new device or volume. To do this, follow these steps:
- Right-click 'My Computer', and then click 'Manage'.
- Under Computer Management (Local), click 'Disk Management'.
- In the list of drives in the right pane, right-click the new drive and then click 'Change Drive Letter and Path(s)'.
- Click 'Change', and in the drop-down box, select a drive letter for the new drive that is not assigned to a mapped network drive.
- Click 'OK', and then click 'OK' again.
- Restart the computer.
