Extra CD drive showing in Explorer, but does not exist.

[Naa'Il]

I am running a Windows XP SP3 desktop. Today when i booted up my system and opened My Computer, i found CD Drive F is showing as a 3rd drive in Explorer, but when i check the same in device manager it show up only the 2 drives. Can anybody please tell me what is causing the phantom CD Drive to show up?

I tried searching for this problem on web, found few articles on this forum. One of them was showing the following steps to follow:

• Click Start>Run, type: cmd
• At a command prompt, type "set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1" and press ENTER.
• Now type the following in command prompt and press ENTER: start devmgmt.msc
• Under Device Manager window click View > Show hidden devices.
• Remove any entries that exist for the phantom CD drive under the DVD/CD-ROM Drives category.
• Close Device Manager and reboot.

I followed all these steps properly but still the problem remains. I even tried deleting 2 greyed out drives that were showing but CD Drive F still remains. Any help would be appreciated. Many thanks.

[Judy B]

Right click My Computer icon on Desktop, Click Manage, Select Device Manager from the Left Panel and high light CD device Properties. Here you will find a checkbox to 'disable this device'. By doing so if it removes one of the other drives, instead, you probably have some confusion in drive letter assignment. Hence you should try changing the drive letter by going into Disl Management. You will find this just below the Device Manager in the left pabne or simply run this command in RUN "diskmgmt.msc".

[Naa'Il]

Thank you very much for the help Judy. I followed your instructions and disabled both visible drives from the device manager but still the CD Drive F remained as it is in Windows Explorer. However the F drive is not showing up in device manager of course. I though removing softwares like Nero and In-CD can help out, removed the same but yet no success.

[idi]

Dear Martin / Naa'Il:

That was great, I had the same problem... and solved without Uninstalling the Ultraiso... based on your solution... I found this:

I went to the Ultraiso "options" "configurations" and under the "virtual unit" row number of units: selected: "not found" insted the "1" that it had.


I hope this complement that solution for others.-

Regards,

PS: Thanks to Mark L. Ferguson also, because he also helped to us very well with his initial guide.-

[rwhaller42]

You guys saved me a lot of pain! My problem WAS ISO something (I forget the exact name). Uninstalling it fixed things. Ironically, I used the darn program only once some time ago... Good lesson in getting rid of things you don't really need!
BTW, I was running V***, not XP. The system came that way and by the time I wanted to roll back to XP, I had too much junk to move without a LOT of effort.

Rich

[eddyq]

If you are using a MagicJack then that will create one phantom CD and one phantom USB device.

[hkb]

Though a bit late, this topic helped me locate the problem.

Mine was with PowerISO. Even though I had no virtual drives mounted I was still seeing that extra cd drive! This drove me crazy. I uninstalled any & everything that could even remotely cause this. But no go.

Finally I found that even though the virtual drive was disabled or not mounted, there was another pull-down menu for the number of virtual drives you would want. I had this set at 1, and never gave it a 2nd thought as virtual drives were not active. Oops! By setting 'Set Number of Drives' to disable (0), the extra cd promptly erased itself.

Goes to show how a simple secondary setting has major impacts ( to me).

note: I notice this falls under Windows XP Support, well it holds true for all versions of Windows. I can vouch for both XP, & 7, 32 & 64 bit, both OS's.

Great forum....
HKB