XP Pro SP2 Disk Manager Bug?

Status
Not open for further replies.
Please help.

It appears that my new XP Pro SP2 installation (ALL patches and updates
applied) has a 'broken' disk management service.

I have spent 2 days trawling forums before posing this. I use Daemon Tools 4 and 1 USB flash drive.

I am at the point where XP refuses to assign drive letters to ANY new device, be it physical or virtual.

Even with DT uninstalled and all its .sys files and registry entries thoroughly removed, the problem remains.

It's almost as if the drive letter assignment has been 'locked'.

The Disc Management can 'see' the devices - but the drive letter assignment will not work.

Even manual assignment will not work.

So in summary.

USB flash drive detected but not assigned a drive letter. Manual assignment refused.

New install of Daemon Tools (creating 1 virtual drive by default) installs ok, detected virtual drive ok. Drive assignment refused.

There are no mapped network drives and there never have been.

It seems that there are many users out there on the forums of the world
with a similar, if not identical problem.

Many have arrived at the conclusion that it's just a windows bug and we
have to live with it or re-install.

As for re-install, I have a custom XP disc (nlite) which oddly will not give me that facility (even though I kept the option to have it in my iso as per the installation app). So this currently is not an option for me (after spending all weekend doing a BIG install).

If I can get an answer to this, then I will be visiting many forums to spread the good news.

Any thoughts would be most welcome.

Thanks, Dan.
 
I am running 4 machines with XP SP2 and using flash drives and USB 2.0 external drives on them and have no such problem. so it is more likely that it is a problem caused by Daemon tools than SP2.
 
Not Daemon Tools related

It seems that Daemon Tools just exacerbated the problem, given that it can iinstall multiple virtual drives, thus hogging up drive letters.

A re-install is something I wish to avoid at this stage - after all, I am trying to resolve this issue on a freshly installed system as it is.

Many people have run into this issue.

I can reproduce the problem now without Daemon Tools installed (or remnants there of).

It looks as if the autoplay function is also caught up in this behaviour.

The MS autofix application helps temporarily, but with no real permanency.

After a weekend of research, it really looks like a Windows error. There will probably be some kind of registry resolution somewhere - as yet unfound

Dan
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back