Residual drive inaccessible

[mrx23dot]

I was mounting up/down encrypted volumes, but last one stuck. I cannot mount again. I cannot open it. Breaks my automation scripts. Probably some hard to reproduce windows bug, but still we should be able to drop the drive.

Expected behavior

Drive should go away after forced unmount.

Observed behavior

Drive stays, inaccessible, cannot be removed

Steps to reproduce

Mount up/down multiple times, happened randomly.

Screenshots

when opening it:

cmd says: s: The system cannot find the path specified.

Doesn't show as valid:

Your Environment

Please tell us more about your environment

VeraCrypt version: 1.25.7 win7 x64

I can try suggestions till the end of the day.

[mrx23dot]

S: missing from Vera:

[nikkopt]

Just updated VeraCrypt and also experienced this, kind of. I have a ghost Z: drive on "My computer" but that letter is still available on VeraCrypt. Restarting explorer.exe gets rid of it. I'm trying to reproduce the "problem" but it's not doing it anymore.

[idrassi]

This is seem to belong to the same family of issues the first one documented at https://veracrypt.fr/en/Issues%20and%20Limitations.html Basically this is caused by internal caching of Windows Mount Manager and running the command "mountvol.exe /r" as an administrator should solve it (sometime killing explorer.exe or rebooting the machine maybe needed). On VeraCrypt side, we already call necessary Windows APIs when a volume is dismounted in order to free its drive letters but for unknown reasons, Windows Mount Manager may sometime keep invalid references to the drive letter.

[mrx23dot]

mountvol.exe /r sounds good enough, could we execute it after any dismounting?

In a best effort way (in case not running as admin), ignore return values. It shouldn't have any downside.

https://superuser.com/questions/996189/how-to-remove-phantom-drive-letters