Dual Drive Letters in XP PRO~One Drive!

[Såndoz]

Hey all,
I recently added a cdrw to my machine. The drive letter for my backup hard drive was E: So I figure when i added the cdrw it wanted the default lettering system but E: was taken. During this time, XP somehow created and evil twin of my backup hardrive and called it H: Well, after changing the backup hard drive from E: to X: and renaming my cdrw to E: I STILL HAVE THAT H DRIVE which is the same as the x: drive...they are both on my explorer tree and I cannot remove it or make it whole!!!! I have tried doing a deep reformat on the backup drive and renaming the drive letter to no avail....that dam mirror H drive is still there. Disk manager only recognizes the x drive but everywhere else..from windows explorer to disk defrag there is that H: drive. Funny thing is, you can read the same or different data of that drive as well as the x drive...and will show differences in data copied!!! Man help me get rid of the H: evil mirror to my normal x: drive.

Thanks in advance

[alc6379]

Try clearing the CMOS on your motherboard without the hard drive hooked up-- that may help. Also, does that H: drive show up if you unplug the drive?

[Tekmaven]

Open the Command Prompt (Windows XP Dos Prompt), and type the command "subst". Report back what it returns (if it returns anything -> it might say nothing and then return you back to the same prompt you started at).

[Såndoz]

Hey thanks for responding,
I cleared cmos and the H drive shows up again with the X drive (same drive). I then reformatted and relabeled and cleared cmos and still get both drive letters. I then unplugged the drive from the mobo and no drive shows up in any program tree. However, every time I boot windows XP pro, I get the chkdsk progroam that runs to check consistency of the drive in question......My only thought is, is my Quantum fireball dying??

[Tekmaven]

What is the result of subst?

[Såndoz]

Hi,
it just returns me to the prompt line with no information from the subst query.

[alc6379]

Look under Disk Management.

Right click on My Computer, select Manage. You should see the H:/X: drive there? Right click on it, and select "Change drive letter and path..." Do you see 2 entries there? You should be able to remove the one you don't want.

[Såndoz]

Been there multiple times ....it shows the drive as X: but everwhere else in win xp pro from explorer to defrag routines there is the H: as well. Reformatting doesnt change it.