Phantom removable drives

[Guest]

Hi folks,

I have a strange problem with my Windows XP machine (iBuyPower AMD Athlon
3200+, 1 GB RAM, with 2 physical drives (120 GB and 80 GB)running Windows XP
Professional) that I hope someone can help me straighten out. I am seeing
two removable drives being indicated in the My Computer display that simply
are not there and have never been there. Disk Management does not see these
two phantom drives at all but I am unable to reassign the drive letter on any
other physical drive to the two letters (E and F) used by the phantom drives.
I've checked in the BIOS setup for the motherboard and cannot see anything
strange, so I'm not sure where the system is picking up the information. It
really seems to slow the system down when we open the My Computer display
since it seems to be looking for those drives. Any help will be most
appreciated. Thanks!

Alan

 

[Michael Ortega]

Hello,

Does it indicate what kind of drive it is? Perhaps a card reader that came
with the computer or something to that nature.

 

[Guest]

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the quick reply! The phantom drives show up under the heading of
"Removable Drives" on the My Computer display. I think you might have hit
the nail on the head though. Further investigation reveals that our scanner
has two card slots, one for a SmartMedia card and the other for a compact
flash card. I have a feeling you just pointed me to the offending item. My
only concern now is that the the My Computer window still takes almost 5
seconds to display. All other windows open immediately. Any idea there?

Thanks again!

Alan

 

[Guest]

Hi,

If you are sure that you don't have the USB removable drives, try uninstall
it in the device manager.
If they cannot be seen in device manager, go to my computer, right click on
the removable drive icon and then click property, click the hardware tab. In
the drop down menu, if you can see the name of the removable drive, right
click on it and click property, click the driver tab and then click the
uninstall button. If you can't find any removable drive, you may need to run
regedit to clear the non-existing hardwares keys.

Start/Run/Regedit
Navigate to HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USB and look for the folder
containing information about the problematic devices. Now right click on
the folder labeled Vid_Xxxx that contains the information about the
problematic devices and click Permission. Allow full control of the key,
then right click on it and delete it. Now reboot and try again.

Care: backup the registry keys before editing any registry key.
To backup the whole registries, run regedit, right click on My Computer and
click Export. Save the reg file to a specific folder.

Peter

 

[Guest]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the info. Unfortunately, the drives do not seem to be in the
Deveice Manager display. I did try your suggestion about clicking on the
drives themselves and attempting to remove the driver. Once I did this, the
scanner was not accessible anymore but the performance of the My Computer
window improved dramatically. Sounds like the scanner is causing me grief
with the two card slots that Michael pointed me to. There is no way to
disable the card slots on the scanner, so I think I am stuck for now. We do
not use the scanner on a regular basis, so I think I will leave it disabled
(or unplugged) to get my system performance back the way it was. Whenever we
need it, I will enable it again temporarily. The crazy thing doesn't have
and on/off switch so it stays powered on all the time.

Thanks much for the suggestions!

Alan

 

[Guest]

Hi,

If the scanner drivers is the culprit, I would suggest you to download and
install the latest XP compatible WHQL drivers from the scanner manufacturer's
website.

BTW, you can power off the scanner by switch off From AC power outlet if
your AC power have on/off switches. My microtek scanner also don't have the
power off switch and I just power it off from the AC power switch.

Peter

 

[Michael Ortega]

Hello Alan,

Have you looked on the ibuypower web site for newer drivers for the card
readers. If you have the latest drivers and such, when the thing finally
comes on right click and go to properties, then go to the autoplay tab, turn
that off, it might be trying to search to for something that it thinks is in
the drive. Or you can search for it in Device Manager and disable it, I'm
not sure what it pop up as, but it has to be there it might be under USB
hubs or something like that.