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Remove Ghost drive

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When I  cloned a HDD to an external Seagate 6TB hard drive, the Seagate was labeled with the letter G by Windows 10, and Acronis backed up to drive G.

I  then checked this with the boot recovery disk, and the files were there in drive G.

I  subsequently re-arranged the external hard drives, and now the Seagate has the letter K( see attached).  the letter G is assigned to a non existent ghost CD drive, as seen in file Explorer.  I  cannot assign this letter to the Seagate external drive.

I have tried to remove this ghost drive G, to no avail, even using the DOS command DiskPart. That drive G is not visible  on that, or on the Disk Management file ( see images attached)

Can anyone please advise the best way to remove the ghost CD drive G:  so that I can allocate the letter G to the backup Seagate drive?

Anhang Größe
disk management -26Aug21.JPG 180.71 KB
ghost drive.JPG 63.34 KB
diskpart.JPG 89.5 KB
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Jill, the first option is to ensure that you have done a full shutdown and restart of Windows then see if this ghost drive is still shown or not?

Press and hold a Shift key when clicking on Shutdown to do the full shutdown.

If the drive is still present, then go into the Windows Device Manager and remove all CD/DVD devices and again do a Windows Restart so that these are rediscovered on starting again.
From your image you look to have 2 CD/DVD drives using letters D: and F:

I recently had the exact same problem on a system with a Blu Ray DVD drive. I don't even know how it started. I think there was some hardware swapping at the time. Non of the methods I found on the internet worked. I solved the problem by restoring the system to a point in time before the problem started. The problem didn't come back.

Thanks for your helpful and quick response, Steve. What a great Forum this is!!

Yes, I  do have two physical drives, D & F

I  did the full shutdown with the Shift key as you suggested, restarted and checked  File explorer - no ghost CD drive!!!

10 seconds later, it appeared aqain, this time as "I" drive, and my Seagate backup external drive was back as G: drive - YESSS!!!!

Luck of the draw? This ghost drive only appears on File Explorer in Win 10, not in Disk  Management or Diskpart. ( see attached)

Weird!

EDIT: Forgot to mention I deleted my two DVD drives in Device Manager too, as Steve recommended, before the full shut down

Anhang Größe
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Jill, just looking at the difference in the icons shown for your physical (2) CD drives and the ghost drive suggests that the latter is from a different source?  Perhaps a virtual drive arising from some utility software that is installed?

Jill,

Your Ghost drive is a leftover from an ISO file Mount.  You should be able to remove this Ghost drive by opening File Explorer and selecting This PC view.  Next click on your Ghost CD drive to select it.  now look to the top of the Explorer window and you will see a new tab titled Manage.  Click on Manage and a menu should appear.  From that menu you can hopefully select Eject to remove the drive.

If the Eject option is greyed out then you can also use an elevated or admin command prompt to remove the drive as in this example:

mountvol X: /P  where X is the letter of drive you wish to remove.

 

 

Thanks Enchantech for this sound advice.

Before I  received your post, I  uninstalled PowerIso on my PC, re-booted and that worked. No more ghost CD drive

Jill,

Yes removal of the application that creates or burns ISO files such as PowerIso will also usually do the trick.  Gald it is sorted for you.