Random G: Local Disk appeared, 3725gb in size and tells me the disk is unreadable

Question

On my computer, I have a Local disk C: drive (465gb) and an additional D: drive (7.27tb), running Windows 10.

I turned on my computer yesterday and file explorer immediately opened up with the notification "Cannot read or open G: drive". I do not have a G: drive, so this was confusing.

I restarted my PC and upon restart it attempted to repair the drive before booting up. "Repairing G: Drive". This was stuck on 2% for 12+ hours before I turned it off.

After restarting again, the G: drive was gone. However, it comes back randomly, every 2 or 3 restarts.

This 'ghost' G: Drive says it is size 3725gb and has RAW file system, 100% free space. I can see it on the Disk Management program, but I can't open it or anything.

The only performance issues when the mysterious G: drive appears is that certain programs are extremely slow (that normally are not), my PC has 32gb of RAM. I have all my programs on my C: drive and they are not demanding programs, and have had no issues in the past.

It is annoying because my PC gets stuck on the 2% when repairing this mysterious G: drive everytime that it occurs when I am turning on my PC.

What is causing this issues? I can't seem to figure it out and there are not any posts online about this issue.

Thank you

Answer 1

This could be a recovery or other type of hidden partition that is being assigned a drive letter by Windows. You can remove the drive letter to keep it from appearing in Windows Explorer.

Remove Drive Letter Assignment

Click on the windows Start button, type cmd, then right-click the first result (named Command Prompt), and choose 'Run as Administrator'

In the command window that appears, type the following and press enter:

diskpart

The Microsoft Diskpart Utility opens.

Type the following and press enter

list volume

In your case, you should see an entry that has G in the Ltr (letter) column.

To select the volume in the Diskpart utility, type the following and press enter

select volume g

To remove the drive letter that windows has assigned to this volume, type the following and press enter

remove letter=g

You can now close the command prompt window and restart your PC to complete the drive letter removal.