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All Drives Missing from Explorer After Restore

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Hello,

After completing a full system restore, using True Image 2009, I no longer have any drives show up in Windows Explorer, including the "Computer" window. I can browse to any drive or folder by typing the path in the path field, and all programs are working correctly - the drives just don't show up in explorer.

Here are the steps that led to this:
1- Full backup of PC, which includes a C: drive and an E: drive. Both drives are partitions on the same physical hard drive.
2- Installed Office 2010 beta.
3- Decided I don't want it, so did a full system restore using the backup in step 1. I chose to restore the MBR and disk signature.

OS is Windows 7 Home Premium.

I have tried:
1- Changing the drive letters in Computer Management->Disk Management (the drives do show up there)
2- Booting to the Windows setup disk and choosing to repair windows (no issues were found)
3- Checking the Registry at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\NoDrives to make sure the drives were not hidden there. The NoDrives Key does not exist, so that is not the issue.

Any help is much appreciated.

TB

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In registry, do you have any \DosDevices\% show up and any Volume entries?

Look in HKEY_Local_machine\system\MountedDevices

Thanks for the reply, Bodgy.

Yes, there are several entries of each, including my C and E drives.

Thomas:

That is quite an unusual problem. Could you post a screen shot from Windows Explorer's "Computer" view?

Yes - very strange. I can't find any info on something like this anywhere on the web.

Screen shot is attached.

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19961-87391.JPG 46.25 KB

Thomas:

When I installed Win 7 I was unable to "see" my DVD drives unless a disk was in the drive. I can't remember where I found the setting but there it was; something about don't show empty drives. I clicked it and now I see my DVD drives, even if empty.

I'm wondering if there is an option there to show no drives? If I can figure out where it is I'll post here.

Fungus

Fungus:

This might be the option that you were thinking of:

However, all this option does is to grey-out the icons of missing drives as shown for the removable drive M: shown in the Explorer view screenshot below.

Thomas:

That is really unusual. I also note from your screenshot that the item "Computer" is missing from the tree view. For comparison, here is a screenshot from my PC:

I am wondering if this is a profile corruption issue. Can you create a new user temporarily as a test? From the START menu choose Help and Support and type the search term New User Account. Click on the search hit Create a User Account for instructions. After creating the account, log off and log onto the new account. Is the problem still present in the new account?

If not then you could follow the help link Fix a corrupted user profile to repair this.

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20010-87397.PNG 83.48 KB

Thanks, Mark. You were right. If I log in as a new user, my drives are visible in Explorer.

Unfortunately, the "fix" is quite involved, since it means creating a new user and copying files and settings to it. Nothing that is too tough, though.

Thanks so much for your help!

Tom

Tom:

This all begs the question of how this happened in the first place. I would also recommend doing a thorough drive scan for errors and for bad sectors.

Thomas,
If you are not back to normal, would you consider doing another restore?

Choose to checkmark the disk option (see attachment) so the entire disk will be restored. When you select the destination, you can also checkmark the Disk signature option in lower left window.

Do the restore when booted from the TI Rescue CD.

After completion, shutdown and disconnect the source disk before first boot.

Let us know the results.

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20069-87406.jpg 17.41 KB

Mark,

I have no idea how it got to this state, other than that it happened immediately after a restore. After screwing around with trying to create a duplicate profile, I finally gave up - it was impossible to get all of the file permissions right, plus some programs were acting weird or not opening. So...

Grover - this is exactly what I did - I went to an earlier backup and restored that, then restored all of my data (i keep data on a separate drive) with the latest backup. I also upgraded to TI 2010 before doing the restores. Everything seems to be hunky dory now.

I suspect that the problem was due to some obscure registry setting, but why it didn't restore properly is beyond me.

Thanks for the help!

Tom