Windows 10 Virtual Driver Damnation Reincarnated

I talked about this lost partition nightmare at the end of the free Windows 10 upgrade offer, and now that computers are finally starting to catch up on the Anniversary update despite repeated attempts to force the download, it struck again last night.

After the update installed my iTunes library couldn’t find things, all things, which live on my M drive (the mapped path I created when I moved off the external drive that held the library to a multi-terabyte hard drive that was so big it required a virtual disk driver for my older BIOS to recognize it.*

Fortunately I take notes when I troubleshoot so I know what works in case I need to help someone. Well, I had to help myself and reinstall the Acronis Virtual Device driver again for Windows 10 too see what was already there. But it took two installation repair tries plus reboots before it worked.

For a few minutes I was concerned that the driver was no longer compatible, but apparently it or its settings were just overwritten or ignored again. Seagate hybrid SSD/HDD 4 Terabyte drive. You’d think a fancy new operating system wouldn’t bork a fancy newer drive. 

Ha. Anyway, it worked. Click here for details from the first time and where to find the fix.

— David

P.S. The computer that didn’t want to upgrade until I disabled the network card can’t get online now either. It did at least install the upgrade. But I think have to find an older network driver, and of course there’s no roll-back driver offered, so I need to sneaker net I guess.

* Keeping the iTunes library location drive letter and the same — and well clear of multiple partition letters forcing it to change — let me regularly upgrade my external drive by cloning the entire iTunes library to new bigger external drives without changing anything else, even network drive mappings! And I can always go back to that if needed on this or another computer, since the library files live in M:\m (for music of course) with all the contents in folders below that.

P.P.S. Sneaker net is what we called carrying a floppy disc between computers that weren’t networked, online or behaving in the years before USB drives even existed. Flash drives are still technically sneaker net whether your wearing sneakers or something else. And if you fight know what a floppy is, look it up on Alta Vista.