New
#1
Windows 10 does not recognize change of external hard drive
I had something really creepy happen today with Windows 10 Version 1903. Last month I bought a pair of Seagate external USB-connected 8 TB hard drives, model 1XAAY5-570. I unpacked one of them, connected it to my computer, and ran a full system backup. Today I powered down the computer, disconnected that drive, took it to my bank and stored it in my safe deposit box. With the computer still powered down, I unpacked the other one from its factory carton, connected it to my computer, and rebooted. Then I did a "DIR" on the brand-new drive, straight out of the factory box. To my surprise, Windows showed me the directory of the first drive (now three miles away) complete with the same Volume Serial Number, Volume Label which I had personally assigned, and all the files and folders in the root directory. No amount of yelling and screaming “It's not the same drive!” could convince Windows to clear whatever cache it had and refresh itself from the factory-new drive.
Just for grins, I tried running CHKDSK on the new drive, omitting the /F (fix) parameter because I didn't want to change anything on the new drive. CHKDSK proudly announced the label of the original, now-removed drive, and proceeded announce a whole bunch of corruption on the brand-new drive. I aborted it without waiting for it to finish.
Next, I shut down the computer and removed the new external drive, then rebooted, hoping that Windows would notice its absence. Indeed, DIR on its drive letter returned "The system cannot find the path specified." Then I shut down again, reconnected the new drive, and rebooted. It was back, albeit at a different drive letter, but still with the same incorrect Volume Label and root directory.
A little Google searching found a utility called DriveCleanup. According to its web site, “it removes all currently non-present USB Storage Devices, Disks, CDROMs, Floppies, Storage Volumes and WPD devices from the device tree. Furthermore it removes orphaned registry items related to these device types."
So once again I shut down my computer, disconnected the new drive, and rebooted without it. This time, however, I invoked DriveCleanup. It deleted a whole bunch of USB disk devices and registry keys (contact me if you want to see its long log). Full of hope, I shut down the computer, reconnected the new external drive, and rebooted.
But alas, Windows still thinks it is the original drive, now in the bank.
Any ideas how I can get Windows to forget what it thinks it knows and recognize that this is a physically different drive?
By the way, I had used a similar backup strategy with a different pair of external hard drives on my older Windows XP machine, and Windows never got them confused.