Unable to assign drive letters after Win10 Upgrade

Hey everyone,

This seems like a cool place with a lot of people that might be able to help me out.

I tried the Windows 10 upgrade when it first came out and immediately went back to 8.1 when I couldn't get a single one of my internal SATA hard drives to mount.. I have 5 of them, and I just wasn't about to mess with that when 8.1 had no problems at all. Now I have tried it again and the same problem is happening. I want to see if I can figure it out this time. I am using the latest SATA and Chipset drivers for Win10 64 bit from Gigabyte's Website (I am using a Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H Rev. 1.1.

I am "testing" Win10 using a bootable clone of my main SSD (that still has 8.1 on it) and I upgraded it to 10 just to mess with so I can figure out this ridiculous problem.

My problem is that all of my internal SATA hard drives (with the exception of the system drive) cannot be assigned a drive letter in Disk Management. They show as healthy NTFS partitions but I get 1 of 2 different errors when I click on "Change Drive letters and Paths":

1. "Virtual Disk Manager: The System cannot find the file specified."

2 "Disk Management: The operation filed to complete because the Disk Management Console view is not up-to date. Refresh the view by using the refresh task. If the problem persists close the Disk Management console, then restart disk management or restart the computer" Hint: none of the recommended fixes in the error message change anything.

I HAVE been able to assign the partitions a letter and mount them using a third party disk manager called "MiniTool Partition Wizard". It lets me mount the partitions and it works! ..However, if I restart the computer, I am back to square one and have to manually assign each drive letter for each partition every time.

This is easily the worst experience I have ever had upgrading an OS, and one of the most mind boggling issues I have had with Windows in general. I really like Windows 10 and want to keep using it but half of my hard drives being un-mountable is a complete deal breaker right now.

Here are the pictures. The drive that has no partition is one that I messed up while tinkering and trying to figure this out. Good thing its backed up.. haha.

Also here is the link to the 3rd party software I was able to get the drives to mount temporarily (until restart)
MiniTool Partition Wizard | Best partition magic alternative for Windows PC and Server

Disk 0 is indeed the OS drive.

1 and 4 are the same make/model/size of drive, but they are totally different partitions. 1 has sample libraries on it for virtual instruments, and the other has a bunch of my older Pro Tools sessions on it. The more drives, the merrier for Pro Audio work.

I have often wondered why I need the EFI system partition on all of my data drives that don't have a boot loader for an OS or anything important... Can they be deleted? Could that be part of the problem? I much prefer alot of the 3rd party partition management software to the stock windows one, but I think most of these drives were likely formatted with the windows one. It also seems that the Windows one is "ground zero" for everything regarding assigning permanent drive letters. I have been working on getting all of my drives converted to GPT rather than MBR too.

There are actually a few drives that aren't even plugged in right now.. (2 SSDs one with Mac OSX that I don't use much anymore and my main one with Win 8.1 aren't even hooked up while I mess with Win 10)

Any ideas what might be causing so many issues with Windows Disk Management?

- Sam

I would rather not wipe any of the disks that are in the screenshots. I have some other drives laying around that I could try and format to see if they can be assigned a permanent drive letter though. That is a good idea. It would at least rule out whether it is a SATA or Chipset driver issue.

I tried the instructions you sent. Its the same error that was popping up in the GUI Disk Management.

Both of the letters I tried were free/open letters to give a disk.

The weirdness continues. I feel like I should install Windows 10 from scratch, but I don't have a DVD, or ISO to put on a USB flash drive for it.