hard drive letter assignment problem

I have an external hard drive. I mistakenly turned off the unit before
windows was completely shutdown. When I restarted I got a windows installed
box, then a norton box saying norton does not support the repair of this
item. Upon restart windows assigned a new drive letter to the external
drive insted of assigning the drive to the original letter prior to my
mistake. The old unassigned drive letter can't be removed and is causing
the installer problem. Any ideas how I could get rid of this drive letter?

Ed

Ed, you could try temporarily disconnecting the external drive. Then
go to Start>Run type: regedit
Navigate to HKey_Local_Machine\System\Current Control Set\Enum\IDE\ If
there's a folder for your external drive
delete it. Restart and let WinXP load then shutdown. Reconnect your
External drive as if it was new to your system.
"EEEE" <ee.ee@verizon.net> wrote in message
news:%23n4HoxwBGHA.2664@TK2MSFTNGP15.phx.gbl...
>I have an external hard drive. I mistakenly turned off the unit before
>windows was completely shutdown. When I restarted I got a windows
>installed box, then a norton box saying norton does not support the repair
>of this item. Upon restart windows assigned a new drive letter to the
>external drive insted of assigning the drive to the original letter prior
>to my mistake. The old unassigned drive letter can't be removed and is
>causing the installer problem. Any ideas how I could get rid of this drive
>letter?
>
> Ed
>

"EEEE" <ee.ee@verizon.net> wrote in message
news:%23n4HoxwBGHA.2664@TK2MSFTNGP15.phx.gbl...
> I have an external hard drive. I mistakenly turned off the unit before
> windows was completely shutdown. When I restarted I got a windows
installed
> box, then a norton box saying norton does not support the repair of this
> item. Upon restart windows assigned a new drive letter to the external
> drive insted of assigning the drive to the original letter prior to my
> mistake. The old unassigned drive letter can't be removed and is causing
> the installer problem. Any ideas how I could get rid of this drive
letter?
>
> Ed

Run regedit.exe and navigate to
Edit HKLM\SYSTEM\MountedDevices.
Now delete the value that has the offending drive letter,
e.g. DosDevices\F:, then reboot the machine.