Why do I have 4 removable disk drives in Win. Explorer?

[dre2112]

I just rebooted my PC after doing some simple updates/archiving on outlook and when I ran Windows Exporer, all of a sudden 4 removable disk drives (F: G: H: and I:) show up in My Computer.

Now I know I have NOTHING plugged in to any of my USB or other data ports so why am I seeing these? The clutter is driving me nuts!

I tried to "eject" all of them but they still show up.

[Copernic Reporter]

They might be virtual drives. Do you have any CD/DVD mounting software on your computer ? Do you have a card reader?

[dre2112]

actually it happened right after I popped in a CD and Roxio popped up and installed itself (i'm prepping a new computer I got) on my drive, but I have since uninstalled it.

[Copernic Reporter]

Try to uninstall Roxio.

[goretsky Supervisor]

Hello,

Do you have a card reader installed either in the PC or a device attached to it, like a printer?

If nothing else, you could try removing the drive letter assignments through the Disk Management snap-in (filename: DISKMGMT.MSC) by right-clicking on each one and selecting Change Drive Letter and Paths from the context menu that pops up.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

[articuno1au]

Card reader is indeed most likely.

Nice call Goretsky >.<

[+BudMan MVC]

Ok sure you can remove the drive letters from the card reader drives - but makes it hard if you plug something in doesn't it?

Here most likely you are seeing them because you have show hidden on,

So for example you see nothing right

but now look - but see how grayed out

And here you see they are not grayed out

So you can play with combo of these settings so it works how you want, or as suggested you could just remove the drive letters and then you want see them.. I will look to see if group policy or something so you can show hidden stuff but still not see empty drives?

[articuno1au]

How good is this forum.. :D

Great hey.

[gardenman13]

I have the same issue. I've been having issues with the HP 3310 secondary printer which is never recognized by the PC after powering off printer (so I leave it on and allow it to sleep). PC won't auto-install or auto-recognize printer upon USB plug-in, even after turning off printer, unplugging USB, etc. This printer has worked fine before. Yet now, after a shut-down/re-start, I have Drive "G," which has NEVER appeared before. It states it is a "Removable Disk" yet there is nothing else plugged into the PC. I also do not have a icon click-box for "Hide empty drives in the Computer folder". It is simply not an option. Only "Don't show hidden files and folders", which was already selected. I have a newer card reader. My media card reader on the front of the PC quit working a while ago as well as the hot-swapple HP Media drive bay. At this point, I have deleted the secondary printer, yet even after a re-start it still shows as deleting/error. 

 

I clicked on the Drive icon and clicked "Safely remove hardware" and the Drive G icon vanished immediately.

I am really not liking the HP Media Center PC anymore. I've had it since 2007 and the media card reader and the Media bay drive don't work, had a hard drive crash (all data was saved on 1TB secondary drive), so had new C drive installed, new video card, two new DVD writer drives (the OEM HP and aftermarket HP drives both died) and two new fans installed. I bought a second one at a garage sale recently since they are very difficult to find, and the Media bay doesn't work on that one either. It has all of the previous owner's passwords installed and I don't know the method for re-booting it to supercede the Owner's login and command it to get into the Administrator settings to reconfigure the PC to my liking. 

Edited January 22, 2016 by gardenman13