Windows has stopped mounting internal and external drives

Hello,

Recently, I noticed that some USB flash drives were not mounted automatically. Initially I've thought it's not big deal, and just mounted them manually.

But then, after restart, Windows decided to mount nothing but C: . I've already tried about a dozen tutorials about this, fiddling with mountvol.exe and diskpart.exe, both of which says that "Automatic mounting of new volumes is enabled".

In the meantime, I started mounting drives manually after each reboot - yeah, not really a solution, is it. But 2 things were different:

1. When I manually mounted some drive, normally it would just after successful mount appear in the This PC, and sometimes even automatically open the root of the just mounted drive. Now, it does not show in This PC, I must refresh This PC in the explorer at least once, to at least see a new mount appear. It no longer does automatically open in new explorer window.

2. When I disconnect the drive, normally, even if it was a manually mounted, after disconnecting the mount would automatically disappear from This PC. Currently though, the mount does not disappear, and the only way I can make it go away (besides rebooting), so I can reuse it, is by using mountvol.exe .


Kind of desperately, I did an repair upgrade, although to a 20H2 version of Windows. (BTW it's not as "harmless" as it might be portrayed in the tutorial, for example, it cleaned up my hosts file, and completely removed all of my custom installed certificates from secure store. And I think these are not the only two things that got "cleaned up" and I'll have to repair them)

The only thing that has changed is, that now, Windows mount some of the external USB drives, but for example my D: drive that is internal SATA drive, gets unmounted after about two reboots, then I have to manually mount it again, and that again lasts for about two reboots.


So, the current version I am running is 20H2.

Hope we come up with some ideas, thanks!

Yeah, I've thought of that. You can also skip DISM online integrity check, did that as well...

C:\WINDOWS\system32>sfc /scannowBeginning system scan. This process will take some time.Beginning verification phase of system scan.Verification 100% complete.Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations.C:\WINDOWS\system32>Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool
Version: 10.0.19041.572


Image Version: 10.0.19042.630


[==========================100.0%==========================] The restore operation completed successfully.
The operation completed successfully.

Okay, let's see:

1.
DISKPART> automount
Automatic mounting of new volumes enabled.

2.
DISKPART> automount enable
Automatic mounting of new volumes enabled.


PC restarted. Volume D: was not mounted, again.
Trying 4:

DISKPART> auto mount scrub
DiskPart successfully scrubbed the mount point settings in the system.
Automatic mounting of new volumes enabled.

Pc restarted, D: still not auto-mounted,
trying 5:

C:\WINDOWS\system32>mountvol /e

C:\WINDOWS\system32>
Pc restarted (this is getting annoying...) D: not auto-mounted.
trying 6:

C:\WINDOWS\system32>mountvol /N

C:\WINDOWS\system32>
Same thing, reboot... Yeah, still no D: ...
proceeding to 7:

C:\WINDOWS\system32>mountvol /r

C:\WINDOWS\system32>

Proceeded to step 8 without reboot:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\mountmgr
NoAutoMount has value 1 (why...)

Using *.reg file... NoAutoMount was set to value 0 by the reg file, rebooting...

Sadly, the D: wasn't mounted, again, but I've checked the registry whether the NoAutoMount hasn't changed, but it remains at 0. Though it looks like the USB drives started to be auto-mounting properly. I will mount D: manually and see if it survives few reboots, as it should...

Nope, D: got unmounted after reboot...

D: is an internal HDD,
The device I am using is a laptop, so there are not much cables that I'd check - drive works ok, after manual mount...
CheckDisk says no issues or errors found on D:
drive on which the D: is, has a multiple partitions, MBR scheme, first partition is the D: parition, then there are two partitions at the end of the drive, where some Linux resides, but I've had it in this condiguration with no issues, - what was mounted, remained mounted.

I will take a look at HD Tune, but If you're suggesting it just for checking the SMART, I am pretty sure there is everything all right, Il'l check anyways though...

Because I see this exact behaviour with some usb drives (not flashdrives/"USB keys"), I believe the d drive isn't failing. At this point, I'm suspecting some kind of file system corruption, not the data kind that chkdsk would detect though. More like corruption in partition descriptors and whatnot. Because newly formatted partitions are automounting correctly. But I can't just reformat all partitions now, I would lose all the data. Do you happen to know some lower level drive inspection tool, but for partitions not for smart and such.