My external HD "MY_D" died!  It was only being used only to back up my C: drive, so I gave the new drive the same name "MY_D".  The odd thing is that NG15 will only address this drive as "MY_D (2)" and tells me that MY_D is not available.  It's not a big deal since everything works fine, but how can I get NG to see the drive as MY_D?

Thanks, Bill

Bill,

This should work if "MY_D (2)" is annoying you. Clear the Ghost history.

Right click Computer, Manage, Services and Applications, Services. Stop the Norton Ghost Service. Then go to (if Win7) C:\ProgramData\Symantec\Norton Ghost\History and delete all the .PQH files that are present. Then restart the Norton Ghost service and reboot.

You will have to set-up your Ghost backups again.

Bill Mullin

Bill Mullin wrote on Feb 4^th, 2012 at 9:23am:

Well, if deleting Ghost's *history memory* doesn't make Ghost forget--then I have to think Ghost is getting its HDD info from the Windows Registry.

There's a registry key whose data you can delete and force WinXP to re-initialize all the devices with assigned drive letters (and names ?)--I don't know if that same key exists for Win Vista or Win7.  What Windows version are you using?

Bill Mullin

Sorry I've been so slow to get back--had trouble finding my previous info on how to make WinXP loose its *memory* on drive letter assignment.

Bill Mullin wrote on Feb 5^th, 2012 at 7:51am:

To be honest, I don't know if this applies to Win7 and Ghost v15.x--but, you could give it a try and report back if it has any effect.  It involves editing the Registry--so you want a back up of the Registry that you know you can restore (even if you can not boot Win7), or a backup of the OS partition with Ghost that you are sure you can restore before muckin' around with the Registry....so here goes....

So, first of all--find out if Win7's Registry has this key:  *[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices]*.

Start RegEdit (does Win7 have this program?) and see if MountedDevices is there.

This list in WinXP will have all the HDD drive letter assignments, and all the USB devices that are being remembered by WinXP as well.  Now, if you mount more USB devices over time and other USB devices have been disconnected and not used recently, WinXP will start to discard previous drive letter assignments to USB devices and re-using those drive letters for other USB devices--I don't know exactly what triggers that behavior--but, I've seen it happen.

So, if you want WinXP to *loose* its memory of drive letter assignments for all devices, and have it re-learn what devices are mounted, and re-assign drive letters to those devices, you simply highlite the Mounted Devices listed in the right hand column of RegEdit and delete them.  Here are screen shots showing the procedure:





If you have previously manually assigned drive letters to any device--for instance changing an optical drive to drive letter *X:*, then you will have to re-do that using DiskManagement again.

As you can see in the screen shot, there are *volume* IDs and *DOSDevices* drive letters--it may be that Win7 no longer has that *legacy* listing--but, maybe if it still has some backward compatibility with programs still wanting *DOS* based information.  There are no Partition Names (drive names?) listed in WinXP, but perhaps Win7 has something different.

And, I don't know if NG15 is using that Registry key to match up previously seen USB devices with a list of assigned partition or HDD names--but, this may have something to do with it.

Let us know what you find out if you try this technique!