Diskpart - remove drive letter, but returns on reboot / Recovery Parti

Hi there,

This is the first time I have posted here. Hi there everyone.

Windows Version Number: Windows 10 Pro - v 1909.

My laptop has been experiencing a problem. At the root of this is a damaged parition table - but I have had to do more than this - and no OS can be found as it is divded over two drives C: and E: which is a ramdisk created by the recovery process in response to the partition table corruption.

However in using TestDisk by way of only a test. My recovery partition has been slightly changed whilst I actually did nothing to it. The recovery partition is nolonger hidden and now has a drive letter f:. What I am trying to do is return it back. I can easily hide the partition by giving it a 'set id 27' in diskpart. But if I 'remove' the drive letter in diskpart it does go only to return on every reboot. My question is how to permanently remove this drive letter, any idea of the practices used by the manufacturer to achieve this? I want to reconfigure it just as it had been set up. (I have got another solution, but wanted to ask before I try this one). The aim is to get ... bcdedit /enum all ... to state the same that had listed the hidden recovery partition in one of the windows boot loader entries. This partition might have related to the creation of e: the ramdisk? (I am aware winre / winpe can create this).

Then I want to make sure the recovery partition is correctly configured and if it still is playing a role in the recovery process after all the updates of windows made in the past. For this I am aware I need to use reagentc.exe. But is this just a case of establishing the paths to the files install.esd and winre?

Any ideas? :)

Hi Andre,

Thanks for the welcome and getting back to me. In response to your questions...

A power surge has caused my OS to crash. And, this was only due to coming out of hibernation. Then it went into recovery mode. From the command prompt I have tried the usual troubleshooting. That is after letting automatic repair have a go. I was in a loop with this failing and starting again. I ran bootrec which fixed the MBR but was denied access when I ran /fixboot until I did this via the DVD that I booted it off that then was fixed. So next I tried SFC that included as offline. Which resulted in 'windows resource protection was unable to perform this operation', and in all cases. Chkdsk did close a process amd_64... which I think came from WinSxS and then it was able to run a check when dismounted finding nothing wrong with the HD. (I had only done this days earlier, and it passed with no probems then). Then I turned to DISM and could not run this as /Online as this was not supported by WinPE. But nor was it with /offline, and I tried a variety of these. (Please note there are no logs, except when taken from X: and they are not that informative. Stuff like E: is not a wim mount point was the best). A missing ssshim.dll (copied off X: to c: and E:) was mentioned as part of the errors 2, 3, 50 and 1639. These all failed. As did a reset: 'there was a problem resetting your pc no changes were made.'

The problem is the power surge has damaged the partition table and the recovery process has produced a ramdisk E: which has most of the files on; windows and my own. The c: drive has system32 but it is minimal barely worth mentioning. I have configured a system32 folder with config for the E: drive from X:. This does nothing for ssshim.dll etc nor for bootrec to fix startup repair /automatic repair problem. Rebuilding the BCD gave me error 0xc000000f but I repaired this. Turning off automatic repair gave me error 0xc000000f too. From these I got a srttrail.txt log which confirmed what I thought. Partition Table Repair and No OS present. TestDisk gave me error 0xc0000225 which bootrec etc solved. Rebooting was problematic at first then it stabilised to how it was when it crashed. So that is the problem so far.

I am aware of mountvol as an options, which is what I was going to try next along with diskpart automount scrub. But I was unsure as to how to undo mountvol if I had to??

Cannot now make an image of HD. It is the recovery mode no access to windows, and in the past I chose not to do this option as I have other methods.

But will turn to in-place upgrade from DVD a bit later, as I want to save my files, that are mostly backed up anyway including the ones I did from command propt with xcopy and robocopy.

However, I want to have a go at repairing the partition table with testdisk and this includes the recovery partition first. I want to solve the creation of a ramdisk as I have had this before and just did a clean installation then. This time I want to advance my response.

:)

Yup, this crash has produced a good problem which you could call a mess. Everything I throw at it leads to another problem. But it is this that I want to solve, a computer challenge. It seems possible, and I want to try? (Already stopped at a repair / clean installation in the past).

It is partition table repair. And I want to give this go, this time.

Will now have to try this a bit later on. I will let you know as soon as I can.

Yet. still have complete backup and in place upgrade as an alternative.

Keeping you up to date...

The mountvol ... command was not effective. Plus it is meant for folders and directories.

Using diskpart 'automount scrub' actually disables automount, but then needs to be enables; so this fails.

How about deleting the registry entry for the f: drive?

It is worth knowing that this recovery partition never appeared once it was remove or ??? and all USB's etc would take the volume letter f: when connected. But a minor attempt, a test, at dealing with the partition table in testdisk did more than expected. The * was removed which denotes the bootable primary partition. (Afterwards all you have to do is make it active later on). It is after this that the hidden recovery partition was assign a drive letter.

Any other ideas, other than using regedit, on how to permanently remove the drive letter from the recovery partition even after rebooting? Once this is solved I can then move onto testdisk and the partition table. :)

Hey bud, not been on here for a while

I dont want to put you on a downer or anything but there maybe more than just one extra drive causing problems. Something to think about

TroubleShot said:

... if I 'remove' the drive letter in diskpart it does go only to return on every reboot. My question is how to permanently remove this drive letter...

There is a registry key that holds values to restore drive letters on a reboot. If you have have a value in this key for the letter that keeps returning then you need to delete this value as well as using Diskpart to remove the letter assignment. For this user it was the letter 'I' that kept reappearing...

Bree said:

Remove the drive letter (yet) again using Diskpart.
Then, before rebooting, open Regedit. Go to Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices
Does that key contains a value named \DosDevices\I: ? If so, right-click on it and delete that value. Then try rebooting.

Too many partitions on my C drive

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@jumanji may have additional recovery comments?