Veracrypt Windows Drive Letter Assignation Issue

[Benedikt H]

Hello,

I'm experiencing a technical issue with Veracrypt and the drive letter assignation of my computer.

I have 3 physical hard drives:

SSD 240 GB Drive Letter C - System drive - Windows partition fully encrypted
HDD 1,5 TB Drive Letter K - Data disk - data partition fully encrypted
HDD 2 TB Drive Letter H - Data disk - not encrypted

All of the drive letters are listed under my computer, but there is an additional drive letter I that's an empty drive and that's not assigned to any internal or external drive in the Windows disk management settings. The letter is visible even when no VeraCrypt volume is mounted.

When I mount the encrypted data disk partition with drive letter D, Windows assigns the letters D and I to the mounted volume. If I mount the volume with any other drive letter, Windows just assigns the chosen drive letter to the volume, but the mysterious drive letter I is still visible under my computer.

I already followed the recommendations from the documentation and cleared the Windows Mount Manager cache with the command prompt "mountvol.exe /r" and I also deleted all Veracrypt entries from the registry path "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices". I restarted my computer after trying each method with no results.

I have to add that the described problem started after I tried to set up the data partition from Drive K to be automatically mounted with letter D with the System Favorites function of VeraCrypt. It appeared that drive letter D was already assigned to a different drive, which wasn't visible in the disk management, so the data partition from drive K couldn't be mounted automatically during the boot process. Instructions I found on the internet recommended to replace the letter D of the registry entry of drive letter D under "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices" with a different random letter to make D available to be assigned to a new drive again. I did this and replaced the letter D with the letter I and restarted my computer. Since this this didn't change anything and there was no partition of any of my drives assigned to that letter, I decided to delete the registry entry with the drive letter D altogether.

My goal is to remove the mysterious drive I and to free drive letter D, so I can automatically mount my data partition with it with the System Favorites function of Veracrypt. I would really appreciate any help on how to fix this.

I uploaded the following screenshots to my dropbox:

1) Disk Management
2) My Computer with no Veracrypt volumes mounted
3) My Computer with encrypted data partition of drive K mounted with letter D
4) My Computer with encrypted data partition of drive K mounted with (random) letter L
5) Registry entries under path HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices (after deleting all VeraCrypt entries according to the documentation)

[Enigma2Illusion]

In VeraCrypt with all volumes dismounted, click the Select Device and post a screenshot of that screen.

The reason I ask, it is recommended to remove the Windows drive letter from dismounted VeraCrypt volumes. In your case, K drive letter if you encrypted a partition of the drive verse the entire drive without partitions. The requested screenshot above will answer my question of partition or no partition encrypted.

Which version of VeraCrypt are you using on your PC?

What version of Windows are you running and is it 32-bit or 64-bit?

[Benedikt H]

Thank you for your answer, Enigma2Illusion!

I uploaded the requested screenshot to my Dropbox. Should I remove the drive letter of drive K in the Windows 10 disk management settings?

I updated to VeraCrypt 1.21 yesterday. The data partition was encrypted with VeraCrypt 1.18 before I made the update, though.

I'm running Windows 10 64-bit.

Thank you for your support!

[Enigma2Illusion]

Thank you for providing the requested screenshot.

With all VeraCrypt volumes dismounted, use Windows Disk Management to remove the K drive letter.

If you are willing to use the DriveCleanup utility below to remove 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.

• Dismount all VeraCrypt volumes.
• Create a directory and unzip the files into the directory.
• Start a command line prompt as Administrator.
• In the command window, change into the directory where you unzipped the files. If you are using 64-bit Windows OS, change into x64 subdirectory.

.
Use the following command to see what the DriveCleanup utility will remove from the registry:
drivecleanup -T

To remove items the registry:
drivecleanup

Reboot PC after running utility.

http://www.uwe-sieber.de/files/drivecleanup.zip

http://www.uwe-sieber.de/drivetools_e.html

[Benedikt H]

Thank you! The K drive is not visible when I open My Computer anymore after removing the drive letter with the Windows Disk Management. :-)

I used the 64-Bit .exe of the DriveCleanup utility as Administrator two times. Drive I was still visible after the first attempt, but the second try finally removed it. Thank you very much!