Drive Letter Conflict: Windows Operating Systems - Kingston Technology IRONKEY D500S User Manual

Help and Troubleshooting

Drive letter conflict: Windows operating systems

•
As mentioned in the 'System Requirements'
section of this manual (on page 3), the
D500S requires two consecutive drive letters
AFTER the last physical disk that appears before
the 'gap' in drive letter assignments (see Figure
9.10.) This does NOT pertain to network shares
because they are specific to user- profiles and not
the system hardware profile itself, thus appearing
available to the OS.
•
What this means is, Windows may assign the
D500S a drive letter that's already in use by a
network share or Universal Naming Convention
(UNC) path, causing a drive letter conflict. If this
happens, please consult your administrator or
helpdesk department on changing drive letter
assignments in Windows Disk Management
(administrator privileges required.) As
mentioned in the 'System Requirements'
section of this manual (on page 3), the
D500S requires two consecutive drive letters
AFTER the last physical disk that appears before
the 'gap' in drive letter assignments (see Figure
9.10.) This does NOT pertain to network shares
because they are specific to user- profiles and not
the system hardware profile itself, thus appearing
available to the OS.
In this example (Figure 9.10), the D500S uses drive F:, which is the first available drive letter after drive E: (the last
physical disk before the drive letter gap.) Because letter G: is a network share and not part of the hardware profile,
the D500S may attempt to use it as its second drive letter, causing a conflict.
If there are no network shares on your system and the D500S still won't load, it is possible that a card reader,
removable disk, or other previously installed device is holding on to a drive-letter assignment and still causing a
conflict.
Please note that Drive Letter Management, or DLM, has improved significantly in Windows 10 and 11 so you may
not come across this issue, but if you are unable to resolve the conflict, please contact Kingston's Technical Support
Department or visit Kingston.com/support for further assistance.
Figure 9.10- Drive Letter example
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