Gfrktyl

I have a USB drive that Disk Management shows as

Disk 9

Basic

1863.02 GB

Online



Old-Cavalry-WDC-2TB (L:)

1863.01 GB NTFS

Healthy (Primary Partition)

This is correct.

But in Windows Explorer This PC, I don't see the drive under the "Devices and Drives" section. Instead, I see it under "Network Locations" as:

terabyte (\rich-6370)(L:)

and there is a red X on the icon.

This is completely bogus. But I can double-click it to bring up its correct contents and traverse it with no trouble. Some months ago I did have a persistent network connection to that server (running XP) with drive letter L, but the server is no longer on the network. Running "net use" gives:

New connections will be remembered.

There are no entries in the list.

Running "net use L: /delete" gives:

The network connections could not be found.

It has bothered me for a while that on boot I get a box saying "Not all network drives could be reconnected", even though I have not had any network drives for a while. I had just connected this drive to a USB hub, and it got assigned drive letter L by the system, and that's what caused me to notice this problem. As far as I can tell, there are no issues using L: to access the USB drive, it's just that explorer is confused about it.

I just now used Disk Management to change the drive letter to M, and that caused the drive to show up correctly in the Devices and Drives section with drive letter M. But there is still the bogus entry with letter L in the "Network Locations" section.

How can I get rid of that? I guess I can try setting "net use persistent:no" and rebooting, but I don't have much confidence in that.

Using File Explorer, have a look under:
'C:Users{username}AppDataRoamingMicrosoftWindowsNetwork Shortcuts' ('AppData' is a hidden folder).
Delete any shortcuts you do not need from that location.

As it turned out, my own suggestion that occurred to me as I finished typing the question worked: Setting "net use /persistent:no" and then rebooting got rid of the spurious entry. I was just in a hurry to get out the door and didn't have time to try the reboot. And I'm glad that happened, because the answer suggested by @Chris Rutz has some good information I didn't know about.

But I'm marking this the correct answer, since it solved the problem.

Note: I started the reboot just before I left the house, and when I returned the spurious entry was gone. I then looked in C:Users{username}AppDataRoamingMicrosoftWindowsNetwork Shortcuts as Chris suggested, but it was empty. If had previously contained a shortcut, and either Chris's answer or mine would have worked equivalently, I don't know.