Phantom raw drive of size 0 appears only in Windows Explorer

[Vince C.]

Hi.

I have converted my laptop's Windows XP into a virtual machine for VMWare.
Don't know if it was the cause but ever since I have a phantom V: drive
that appears only in Windows Explorer. It looks like a Raw drive but its
size is zero byte!

It doesn't appear in the Storage management MMC snap-in. It doesn't appear
either when I type "subst" on the command line. It also has a red question
mark on it. When I want to change, say, the CDROM drive letter from the
Disk Manager MMC snap-in, the letter V doesn't appear in the list of
possible letters for the drive.

Does anybody know how I could get rid of that drive? BTW how are drive
letters assigned and from where can they be observed? Do they appear in the
registry?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Vince C.]

There are several programs that can create virtual drives. Nero, Daemon
Tools, and Virtual CD are just a few. Check System Properties->Hardware
Tab->Device Manager button. See if you have anything listed under SCSI &
Raid Controllers it may point to which program has created this.

Vince C. wrote:

Thanks for your hints. I indeed have a hidden device, vmscsi, which
probably comes from VMWare conversion (VMWare uses virtual SCSI devices by
default and if I remember correctly I converted my virtual machine hard
disk from SCSI to IDE).

Removing vmscsi didn't get rid of the phantom drive. Besides I have
uninstalled vmware converter and all its components.

Is there really no way to check what driver/component/stuff/whatever that
drive is attached to or relates to?