With the shift to a more “app-like”, “force an update down your throat whether you like it or not” attitude from Microsoft, they have also seemingly shifted their testing stance and shafting their customers, taking from Xiaomi’s playbook: You are now our beta tester.

You Have a New (largely useless) Drive!

One of my family members have been complaining that an “E” drive suddenly appeared out of the blue. Navigating to it using Windows Explorer or via the command prompt shows it as empty, but, Windows Explorer shows the drive as “nearly full” (red bar), and Windows 10 continuously complains that the “E” drive is “full”…

Nothing in the Disk Management Microsoft Management Console “applet” could allow me to remove the drive letter, showing the partition type as an “OEM Parititon” – one of two that Microsoft littered on the already-small SSD like so many rabbit droppings (two other partitions are by the laptop manufacturer).

Removing “OEM Partition” Drive Letters

A quick search shows up with this page explaining that Windows 10 Build 1803 update caused this, and also showing the (simple) fix:

Using an elevated command prompt (i.e. with “Administrator” rights/permissions), run the following command:

mountvol <drive letter> /d

Where <drive letter> was the offending drive letter that appeared.

Thereafter, simply run diskpart and execute the following commands:

diskpart
list vol
select vol <number of offending volume>
attrib vol set nodefaultdriveletter

Type exit when done. Feel free to run the command detail part before and after the attrib change command to see the difference. (And now you know why it is a “good habit” to read instructions/an article thoroughly before dashing off to do anything. )

That last bit should prevent the partition from showing up again if the drive is moved to another computer.