Phantom Drive In Explorer

[Flightdisc]

Hello all,

Explorer is showing a CD-ROM drive which I cannot account for. I think it
might be a virtual drive created by some application I installed but I cannot
confirm this. I hard two hard drives (one with split partition) designated
as (C: D: and E. I then have two physical DVD-ROM drives designated as (F:
and G. These all show correctly in Disk Manager, but when I open Explorer
I see an icon that represents another CD-ROM drive which is designated as
drive H: but I don't have a third CD-ROM drive attached to my computer.

This is very strange. Anyone out there ever seen anything like this before?

 

[M.I.5¾]

Hello all,

Explorer is showing a CD-ROM drive which I cannot account for. I think it
might be a virtual drive created by some application I installed but I
cannot
confirm this. I hard two hard drives (one with split partition)
designated
as (C: D: and E. I then have two physical DVD-ROM drives designated as
(F:
and G. These all show correctly in Disk Manager, but when I open
Explorer
I see an icon that represents another CD-ROM drive which is designated as
drive H: but I don't have a third CD-ROM drive attached to my computer.

This is very strange. Anyone out there ever seen anything like this
before?

There are some applications that do indeed generate what appears to be a
phantom (or virtual) CD drive. Without knowing what you have installed
recently, it is hard to comment but I do know that some sophisticated CD/DVD
copying utilities do create them (but other apps may as well). They have
the ability to copy the CD or DVD to a hard drive image which can then be
loaded into the virtual drive and accessed just like a normal optical disk
only much faster. 'Ejecting' the disk dumps the image.

 

[Don Phillipson]

Explorer is showing a CD-ROM drive which I cannot account for. I think it
might be a virtual drive created by some application I installed but I cannot
confirm this. I hard two hard drives (one with split partition) designated
as (C: D: and E. I then have two physical DVD-ROM drives designated as (F:
and G. These all show correctly in Disk Manager, but when I open Explorer
I see an icon that represents another CD-ROM drive which is designated as
drive H: but I don't have a third CD-ROM drive attached to my computer.

One cause of such behavior is the (photo) card readers
built into many multifunction printers nowadays. Even
when empty the card readers appear in Windows as
pseudodrives. Repost identifying your hardware.

 

[Bob I]

Plugging in a U3 enabled memory stick will do this.

 

[Flightdisc]

Hmmm, you all have touched on interesting possibilities. I do have a
multifunction printer (HP Photosmart C7280), Memorex Flash drive and a
multitude of software capable of creating virtual drives. Sounds like the
remedy may involve the process of elimination, a tedious process indeed.

At any rate, I shall follow the paths presented by all of your replies to
this post and will post back with results. Thank you all for responding to
this post, much appreciated.

-FD

 

[kws]

This might help

http://windowssecrets.com/2007/04/05/01-How-to-prevent-and-remove-phantom-devices

 

[Don Phillipson]

Hmmm, you all have touched on interesting possibilities. I do have a
multifunction printer (HP Photosmart C7280), Memorex Flash drive and a
multitude of software capable of creating virtual drives. Sounds like the
remedy may involve the process of elimination, a tedious process indeed.

Not if the pseudodrive always has the same letter -- which
you can disable (in TweakUI.) Windows will still see the
pseudodrive but you will not.

 

[Flightdisc]

Everyone,

I wish to extend my sincere appreciation to all responders of this post. I
finally tracked down the virtual drive culprit (UltraISO). It was easy to
get rid of the phantom drive by just setting the number of virtual drives to
zero. It was quite a time consuming process tracking it down when you have
many programs installed that do such things.

Again, thanks to everyone who took time to help me and I learned some new
things from this post along the way. I'm deeply greatful.

-FD