TechRepublic|Forums|Windows

Windows

General discussion

  • Creator
    Topic
  • January 22, 2000 at 2:14 pm #2081809

    Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

    Locked

    by rotocron · about 22 years, 4 months ago

    I have an NT 4.0 workstation machine w/ SP5. The machine has 3, 9g disks, all Ultra SCSI 2 Cheetah LVD’s. All partitions are NTFS. The first disk has two partitions, number one is a 4g boot and system partition, the second 5g is just a data partition. The second and third physical disks are just one big 9g partition (RAID0). The first disk is running on the controller built into the MB. The second and third disks are running on a AAA-131U2 controller (RAID), and is striped and partitionedfor the entire 18g. I have Adaptec’s CI/O software (Build 10) installed and working fine, and the OS see’s the ‘disk’. The problem is that NT will not keep the drive letter. After partitioning and formatting with NT’s Disk Administrator, every time I reboot the machine, the drive letter dis-appears. All I have to do is “Assign Drive Letter” again, and the data is still there and I’m off and running like nothing happened. What’s going on?

    Topic is locked This conversation is currently closed to new comments.
  • Creator
    Topic

All Comments

  • Author
    Replies
    • January 23, 2000 at 1:56 am #3897216

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by vshipp · about 22 years, 4 months ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      HMMM… seems simplistic but are you using the “Commit Changes now” option prior to closing the NT Disk admin?

    • January 23, 2000 at 2:59 am #3897214

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by ravi · about 22 years, 4 months ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      Try this tip from JSI Inc: “Tip 1061 ? SCSI device does not retain drive letter assigned in Disk Administrator.”

      The link is: http://www.jsiinc.com/TIP1000/rh1061.htm

    • January 23, 2000 at 4:55 pm #3897199

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by rindi1 · about 22 years, 4 months ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      This sounds like a problem with your SCSI Controller drivers. Try downloading the newest version of both drivers (the one on yout mainboard as well as the external one) and installing those new drivers.

    • January 24, 2000 at 12:17 pm #3897155

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by powerstroke · about 22 years, 4 months ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      If answer 1 is not correct the nexr question is do you have any ide devices or is this system a CompaQ?

      if so go to this microsoft article
      article ID Q158362

      if not is your termination all good? before and after all the hard drives?

    • January 27, 2000 at 2:02 am #3897038

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by cns admin cz · about 22 years, 3 months ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      We were solving similar problem with COMPAQ
      ProLiant 2500. After we applied the proper SoftPaq {sorry, I do not remember the number} the problem was gone.

    • January 28, 2000 at 2:23 am #3896996

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by pc dr. · about 22 years, 3 months ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      this is in the list of bugs fixed with the newest service patch from microsoft for the nt workstation 4.0 service pack 6 and 6a !!

      get the patch at :http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/nts/downloads/recommended/sp6/allsp6.asp?FinishURL=%2Fdownloads%2Frelease%2Easp%3FReleaseID%3D12378%26redirect%3Dno

    • January 28, 2000 at 12:16 pm #3896969

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by rattlesnake1 · about 22 years, 3 months ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      Upgrade SP6a, if this does cure your problem change out the drive. If this does cure it try a reload.

    • February 1, 2000 at 4:58 am #3896874

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by rlmiller · about 22 years, 3 months ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      I would suggest upgrading to the lastest Service Pack, which I believe is 6a. Also, I’ve had similar issues with IDE drives before, and I ended up using Powerquest Partition Magic to assign the drive letters, and they stuck. I’m not sure why the NT Disk Admin drive letter assignments won’t stick sometimes.

    • February 2, 2000 at 4:48 pm #3897538

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by fprocess · about 22 years, 3 months ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      I have seen flaky behavior in Disk Admin caused by timing conflicts with other services loading auto and started.
      Have resolved by disabling services so they do not loadon the next boot. ( all non ms services ) do they changes stick in an environment which is more native?

      This may seem and prove futile. It sounds more like a controller card issue. I had similar behavior with ide drives and ide zip drives ( which are seen as scsi adpter by NT.

      So,
      Timing or
      contoller update driver or physical.

    • February 3, 2000 at 6:07 am #3897518

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by gkenney · about 22 years, 3 months ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      Make sure that the last device in the SCSI chain is terminated and that there is terminating power. Make sure that the SCSI card is terminated and that no other drives are terminated.

      If disk drives are still misbehaving check the BOOT.INI. Try reverting the configuration. Make sure you back this file up before modifing it.

    • February 3, 2000 at 2:13 pm #3897507

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by cliffg8 · about 22 years, 3 months ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      Your irst problem is tt NT4 doesn’t like a boot partition to be bigger than 2GB. The mawill functionwit bigger partition but you will connuo have the prob you describe. cning the bot partitopn to a 2.5 GB or smaller will slve your problem. Anoter Tip that microsoft recommends is for the bot partitopn to be FAT. This way you can recover the partition when NT crashes. The second thing you might do is look to see if the map drive at boot box is checked.

    • February 4, 2000 at 12:57 am #3897492

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by disillusionedmember · about 22 years, 3 months ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      Make sure that the drivers for the RAID are configured to start at BOOT time. If not, the drive letter configuration is reassigned when the driver finally does start. Had the reverse happen, A system running SCSI only drives had a couple of IDE’sinstalled later. The drivers were not set to start at boot and every restart of the system put the drive letters back to defaults.

    • February 6, 2000 at 7:38 pm #3897422

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by moneychanger · about 22 years, 3 months ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      I presume you are referring to NT Server 4.0 SP5. The admininstrative shares are set to off in the registry ie C$ and D$ etc.. So if you start the registry editor you might observe that the values for AutoShareServer, AutoShareWks , and BeepEnabled have all been set to 0 (zero). AutoShareServer and AutoShareWks are located in

      HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServerParameters

      Edit the AutoShareServer and AutoShareWks by double clicing on them and changing the value to 1 (one)

      Caution: Be sure to backup you registry and update your repair info and repair diskette before editing the registry.

      Dean Eshelman
      EJ Consulting
      St Louis

    • February 8, 2000 at 7:57 am #3897372

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by michel36nl · about 22 years, 3 months ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      Everytime you make a new partition your ‘boot.ini’-file changes.There are some numbers in brackets, for example (3) that indicate the active partition from where to boot. open your boot.ini. make sure you make the file write-enabled first! Change ALL numbers in brackets (3) to a 1-less (2). This should do it……Don’t forget to write-protect when ready.

    • February 8, 2000 at 12:46 pm #3897362

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by puneet mehta · about 22 years, 3 months ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      I have solved similar problem on COMPAQ
      ProLiant 2500 series. U need to apply the newer SoftPaq Patch and Also additionaly apply the newer SP6a for NT.
      This would definitely solve ur problem.

      Puneet

    • February 9, 2000 at 8:30 pm #3897326

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by vivek.gokhale · about 22 years, 3 months ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      Hi there !!!

      You seems to have stuck with some really interesting problem…..If of the things which comes my mind immediately they are as follows.

      1. Create a partition where NT will be install of 2gb or less…..I know you must be wonderingwhy ? the NT installation prorgram is actually a 16 bit and have hosts of difficulties in handling large partitions size.

      2. Do not apply any service packs at all…..just load vanila NT which comes pre bundle with Service Pack 1 and observe the symptom.

      3. Try and use the latest Adaptec driver during the installation….I am sure you will get the latest driver from the Adaptec web site…..but I do not thing this will help in great way but worth rulling out…..

      4. Connect only 1 hard disk and do the necessary configuration then try adding additional hard disk one by one at a time and oberser the symptom.

      5. Use only One controller in the system which is on the MB and use option no. 4 and try …..I think this will help inelimanating more the

    • February 11, 2000 at 6:01 am #3897272

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by cnickerson · about 22 years, 3 months ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      I would say to upgrade to SP6a. We had the same problem with the disappearing drive letters and sp6 fixed the problem. If you cannot upgrade to sp6a then use the microsoft technet cd from January. It has a registry fix for the problem

    • February 11, 2000 at 7:40 am #3897263

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by chipotle1 · about 22 years, 3 months ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      On the boor disk (physical disk)leave a partition (free space) of abot 4-10MB. Before you assign the drive letters highligth the partition and “create” and “commit changes now”. Assign drive letters and delete the partition. Commit changes now, It would probably work because that problem drove us crazy.

    • February 11, 2000 at 12:46 pm #3897254

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by pmdracer · about 22 years, 3 months ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      This seems too simple, but it’s true. I had the same problem once. The simple solution is to check your configurations for a LASTDRIVE statement in Config.sys / Autoexec.bat. Before I get BLASTED by all the other Admins out there, I realize that these are DOS files, and you have NT, but it solved it for me. Just make Lastdrive=Z, and you will not have any problems. Hope it helps. Good Luck.

    • February 16, 2000 at 2:08 am #3897869

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by kdyates · about 22 years, 3 months ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      Rocker can you please let us know what fixes this problem. It seems that there a lot of great answers that could be correct and I for one would like to know the fix.

      Thanks

      Ken

    • February 22, 2000 at 4:18 am #3897639

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by mttymn · about 22 years, 3 months ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      Remember to click OK to make changes in
      effect. If you close out with writing the
      changes it will look like nothing happen

    • February 22, 2000 at 8:32 am #3897635

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by rfernandez · about 22 years, 3 months ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      I have experienced this problem in CD rom Drives and sometimes in Network drives.
      Appling Service Patch, whatever is the latest isn’t gonna help that sounds like a tech support answer.. you know.. hire someone of the street and ask him a question kind. On NTFS the size of the partition shouldn’t matter. The truth of the matter is Windows NT isn’t well made. If it happens it happens.. reinstall the damn software and hope it works fine the next time.. yes anouther techsupport answer but sometimes it come down to that.. If you haven’t done anything to Windows and it crashes.. how could you figure out what happened…would you hire a MCSE to find out? would you call Microsoft? by the way.. this is a Microsoft answer..

    • February 28, 2000 at 11:38 am #3900573

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by davis137 · about 22 years, 2 months ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      does this change when the computer is turned completely off as opposed to a warm reboot as this sounds like the old scsi init problem? (BIOS upgrade to SCSI adapter req.)

      Have the SCSI controlled give a scsi init on boot (in the adapter BIOS config via Ctrl-A)

      make sure you have the correct SCSI bios and latest NT 4.0 driver.

      Are you using an active termination cable?

    • March 1, 2000 at 3:02 am #3900500

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by hkok · about 22 years, 2 months ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      This sounds like a software problem and make sure you are not doing anything funny with the default administrative share, so check the permission on the security tab.

      Did you see the popup window about to confirm the change after the next rebooting after you assign the drive letter from the Disk Administrator?

      -KHY

    • March 11, 2000 at 8:14 am #3898304

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by kelsaidi · about 22 years, 2 months ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      1- Assign Letters Z,Y,X etc. to your CD/DVD drives in an down-to-up order.
      2- Disconnect any network MAPPED drive letter even if it’s mapped to local machine.
      3- Reboot your system.
      4- Start NT with VGA mode and check you CD/DVD drive letters andmake sure nothing went wrong.
      5- Manage any Phantom or Ghost Drive Letter that you might find in VGA mode.
      6- Restart you system in normal mode
      7- Assign drive letters and commit changes
      8- Reboot your machine.

    • March 13, 2000 at 12:50 am #3898254

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by jesselou · about 22 years, 2 months ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      review thoroughly the documentation that came
      with your scsi ultra dma cheetah,recheck jumpers then let cmos autodetect it.review also your security policies or system policies their could be some checkboxes in your diskmanegement that you left enabled due to security reasons.

    • March 13, 2000 at 2:04 am #3898246

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by prescott.small · about 22 years, 2 months ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      I have experience similiar problems in the past. The solution I have impleneted that worked for me was:

      1) Enable parity on the controller and all devices.

      2) Turn on Int13 and make sure the devices
      support it.

      One or both solutions should be all you need to do.

    • March 19, 2000 at 6:36 am #3898036

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by kylegggg · about 22 years, 2 months ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      Helped Me

    • March 19, 2000 at 6:27 pm #3898030

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by ped2000 · about 22 years, 2 months ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      Ibelieve you problem lies with what type of partition you are using. Active or not, if you only have one pation per disk, make the partions active.

    • March 30, 2000 at 1:41 am #3896402

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by shawkengin · about 22 years, 1 month ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      Rocker,
      You have been given great suggestions from all over, but have you checked Ms Knowledge base for similar issues like this? I would start from there.

      Good Luck!

    • August 21, 2000 at 1:59 pm #3765469

      Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      by rotocron · about 21 years, 9 months ago

      In reply to Drive Letter disappears when re-booted

      This question was closed by the author

  • Author
    Replies
Viewing 30 reply threads