Phantom Disk Drives showing in "My Computer"

[Guest]

This is my first experience with this weird issue. I fresh installed WinXP
SP2 Pro and everything is running smoothly, except that when I click "My
Computer" there are 1, 2 and sometimes 3 non existent Local Drives listed
under "Hard Disk Drives". When I click on them a message pops up with a red
cross displaying:"L refers to a location that is unavailable...." The message
is longer that that, but it starts like that.Any fix? thanks.

 

[Kerry Brown]

Do you have a card reader. Do you have a printer with a card reader?

 

[Guest]

Yes, I have a USB2 Sandisk Flash Card reader directly connected to the USB
port in the PC, and a flash card reader in the HP P1100 Printer which is
conected to a USB Hub (but both the printer and the hub are unplugged from
the AC power outlet, I only connect it when I need it). This csame readers
config was present in my previous Windows installation and caused no phantom
disks to appear in My Computer.

 

[Kerry Brown]

When you connect the card reader or the printer do they use the phantom
drive letters or do they get new letters assigned?

 

[Guest]

The USB2 Flash card reader (Sandisk) is permanently connected and active and
it uses drive letters under "Devices with removable storage" (i.e. not the
phantom drive letters). As said before, the Phantom drive letters are 3, they
are labeled as "Local Disk" and show under "Hard Disk Drives" category.

 

[Guest]

Go into my computer and Right Click>Properties>Hardware. That should give
you some idea of what it is

 

[Guest]

I did that and it's not listed in Device Manager. Only the real physical hard
drives are listed, not the phantom ones.

 

[Kerry Brown]

I've seen weird things happen if you have a USB printer with a card reader
attached when you install Windows. This may or may not have caused your
problems. Do the drives show up in the disk management console
(diskmgmt.msc)?

 

[Guest]

No they don't show up in the disk management console. As in Device Manager,
only the real physical drives are listed.

 

[Kerry Brown]

Here is a Google search with has some workarounds and possible explanations.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=xp+phantom+drives&btnG=Google+Search

I don't know what caused this in your particular case. I still suspect
something th do with the USB drives being seen during the install. It can
aslo be caused by some 3rd party software, see the above search for
examples. You can download Tweak UI and use it to delete the drives.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx

This may or may not work depending on what is causing the problem.

 

[Guest]

Thanks, I applied the TweakUI fix and the phantom drives were removed. I hope
that when I reboot the PC and continue using it they won't reapppear.