Windows update can trigger unneeded ‘D drive’ alerts
Q: A message keeps popping up in the lower right corner of my computer saying I’m running short of disk space on local drive D. It tells me to click on the box to see whether I can free up space. But when I click on the box, I don’t see anything that’s full. How do I address this problem?
A: The D drive on most computers refers to the recovery partition where all of the original software is stored in case you may need to reset the computer back to the original factory software load.
Typically this partition is just big enough to store the software and is hidden so that Windows basically ignores it and it stays safe, limiting people from going in and deleting it.
This partition should not have a drive letter associated with it, but the Windows 10 update that came out in April has been known to assign a drive letter, which triggers the Windows feature that alerts you to the fact that you are running out of storage on your hard drive.
To correct this problem you will need to click the Search button and type CMD. When the command prompt icon shows up, right click it and select Run as administrator.
This will open a DOS prompt.
At the prompt, type diskpart and then hit Enter. Next, type list volume and hit Enter again.
This will show you a list of your drive volumes. Make a note of the number assigned to Drive D.
Next, type select volume <volume number> where volume number is the number assigned to drive D. For example, if drive D is volume 1 type select volume 1 and then hit Enter.
The final step is to type remove letter=<drive letter> where drive letter is the letter of the drive you are wanting to remove. In this case it would be remove letter=D.
That should do it. Close the DOS window and the message should no longer pop up.
Just be careful when you are using the diskpart tool. If you remove the drive letter for the wrong drive you could cause some problems for yourself. Double check your work or get a technical friend or relative to assist you if you are not confident in your own abilities.
Q: All of a sudden, I am no longer able to change my desktop settings to any of the Aero themes. They are all grayed out. Is there a way to fix this?
A: To solve this problem I recommend two things. The first is to restart the Themes service. Click on Search and type services.msc and hit Enter.
In the window that pops up, scroll down to Themes and double click it. Click Stop to stop the service and then hit apply. Then click Start to restart the service and click OK. This should restore the option to choose the Aero themes.
The second thing you should do is scan your system for malware, as it’s likely you have some kind of malicious or semi-malicious software that is causing this to malfunction. I recommend Malwarebytes to do this because many antivirus programs don’t always detect the kind of malware that causes this type of issue.