This is happening on Win8 and Windows 10.
When I remove a USB drive and reconnect it, Windows will not assign a drive letter. Clearly this is a problem as every other computer I use assigns a drive letter.
There are three solutions. All of which will work.
1) You can go into Disk Management and select the device and assing a drive letter. This is a manual process and not ideal for each time you plug in a flash drive.2) Good chance the driver or registry entry for that device is rogue or corrupt. Use this USBScrub tool to remove the registry entry. Chances are this will fix the problem. USBScrub link3) Use ‘diskpart’ and enable the automount feature.
Open Command Prompt as Administrator (search for Command Prompt in the Start Menu, right click, Run as Administrator)
Type ‘diskpart’ and hit Enter.
Once in the ‘diskpart’ command prompt type ‘automount enable’ and hit Enter.
Type ‘exit’ and click Enter
For solution number one from above, Disk Management is really the GUI version for diskpart, but a GUI (Graphical User Interface) which has scaled down functions from what all the things diskpart can really do.
Diskpart has 37 commands that you can do very cool things with. The 38th command is
UPDATE: USB Scrub by Nexcopy now supports Win7 32/64bit
Did you know Windows will make over 260 registry entries with a single enumeration of a USB stick? This means for those with multiple flash drives your registry will get extremely cluttered and bogged down.
With flash drives dirt cheap these days, you’ll find at least a couple dozen going into your computer through the year. That would be over 6,240 registry entries.
USB Scrub is a free utility which performs a deep cleaning of those unused drivers and registry edits.
We gave USB Scrub a try, and it worked great. We went from enumerating a single USB stick in 45 seconds to enumerating that stick in less that 12 seconds.
In addition, if you have a USB stick that doesn’t perform correctly or the Windows OS doesn’t see it, chances are the USB Scrub will clear up those problems and your drive will work once again. This is because a registry entry can become corrupt and simply clearing it out will resolve your issue.
So lets take a closer look.
Using RegShot [a free application which takes a snap shot before and after an event and compares only the changed registry values] I took a snap shot before and after a USB stick was connected and ejected. The result was this:
78 Registry Keys where created
183 Registry Values where added
261 Registry edits in total!
Here is a snap shop. Click the image to get the full text file.
