Non-Existent Drive 'G'??

For over a year, my old Win98 computer has had a problem with it. I tried to fix it, but decided I could work around the problem and simply ignore it. I have up to this point, and now a task I need to perform requires that I get this problem fixed.

The problem is Windows thinks there is another CD-ROM drive, even though there's only ONE. The drives installed in my machine are as follows:

A - 3.5 Floppy
C - 30GB Hard Drive
D - *reserved*
E - DVD-ROM
F-Z - none

For some reason, it thinks there is another CD-ROM drive on G. It nearly hangs the machine looking for it. I used TweakUI to tell it to disable that drive letter, and that's how I worked around this problem.

Now I'm stuck because I want to rip a song off of a CD, but Windows Media Player hangs my machine completely when I try this. It seems that even though drive G is disabled for Explorer, WMP takes on it's own to seek drives that Windows supposedly says are there. Since there's apparently no way to stop WMP from seeing G, I now need to fix the problem and make Windows realize there is no G drive.

Can anyone help me?? I would greatly appreciate it!

 

Hi and welcome to the BBS.

Also suggest that you boot into Safe Mode, go to Device Manager and remove any CD drives that may be listed. Look for any hardware that is highlighted as not working correctly, also open the listings and check for multiple listings of the same hardware (these can be highlighted and "removed ", but it will suggest a problem with the drivers for that hardware).

Look for and update the motherboard/chipset drivers.

You don't seem to have any optical "burner" drives. Windows Media Player has a burning program if you install it. See if WMP has a "burn disk" option, if you run it, because there are no burners, it can cause problems with the optical drives.

Have you ever installed a "virtual" CD drive? (to run CDs from your harddrive instead of the CD drive)

Matt

 

Thanks for the replies guys. I appreciate it!

The DVD-ROM isn't connected to the IDE cable used by my hard disk drive. It is connected to my computer through it's own independent cable.

I checked device manager, and there's nothing extra listed. The only CD drive listed is my DVD-ROM, which is correct. I checked everything in device manager, and everything appears to be working.

When I talked about D being reserved, I probably shouldn't have used that word. Really, I meant that D is left open so that when I plug an extra drive in, it becomes D. But I should have typed "D - none" to be less confusing.

As WMP is concerned, I'm not actually burning CDs, I'm just dumping music from a CD and putting it onto my hard drive. But I was certain I had dumped music without a burner drive before. I may be wrong, because it has been a while.

I've never installed a virtual CD drive that I can ever recall.



I should note that D is open because I used to have a second hard drive there. It has read issues now and will bog down my system, so I unplugged it entirely. It's just sitting inside of the case with no connections to it. I made sure to set my good hard drive to be master with no slave attached.

 

This is odd, because I did that and it fixes part of the problem at the very least.

There's no CD drive in the hardware profile, but it still detects a G drive. Thing is, it doesn't stall now. This G drive seems to be my DVD-ROM drive. I can access it in WMP and can even listen to music and everything. The only thing that doesn't happen is autorun.

I'm not understanding exactly why this has happened...?

 

But there is no profile for my drive in Device Manager anymore... I deleted it.

 

http://www.shadowsoft-games.com/saxman/Devman.gif

That's all I got. The CD-ROM listing is gone. I restarted, but it didn't add anything there. Somehow my computer has detected the drive without the use of device drivers. That's why along with my drive E, I also had drive G which was a duplicate of the same drive. But I no longer have a drive E, but G still exists. G works now however, except without a listing in the devices, there's no settings to configure it.

So I'm stumped. I'm glad I can dump music now at least -- thanks guys! But now... getting a listing in Device Manager would be nice.

 

Have you tried using tweak ui to add all drive letters back
Reboot to safe mode
Go to device manager and not only remove the DVD drive, but the secondary IDE controller.
Reboot to bios (setup) make sure that secondary master is set to optical and secondary slave set to none.
Autodetect drives
save settings and exit and boot to windows and let them be redetected.

Your autodetect problem could be caused by a damaged IDE cable. I have never heard of this causing your particular problem, but potentially it could cause an echo which windows may conclude is a second drive. I have encountered cases where this causes windows to reject one of two drives on a damaged cable (or even one of two identical drives on a good cable).

 

Well, I removed the primary and secondary IDE channels from Device Manager. It wouldn't let me just remove one, so I had to remove both. I checked the BIOS afterwards and made sure the primary was set for my hard drive, and my secondary was set for my DVD drive. Restarted Windows and still didn't detect anything. Although this time My Computer stalls my machine and causes it to run extremely slow... when I disable the G drive in Explorer settings, it works fine.

This is what it did in the very beginning when I had all drives enabled by Explorer. But when I deleted the CD-ROM from Device Manager, G didn't stall the computer anymore. But with removing the IDE channels, it stalls it again, even with the E drive missing.

And for the question as to if E showed up in Explorer or not, the answer is that it did. It displayed both E and G. When I deleted the CD-ROM from Device Manager, E disappeared, but G was still there.

I suppose I could try to find another IDE cable to see if that helps. I don't have one at the moment though, so what else can I try?



EDIT:
I restored my hardware profile settings to the way it was before I made this thread so I could try something different. In the configurations on my CD-ROM, the drive letter was set to E. So I wanted to know what would happen if I set it to G. Well, to my surprise, it fixed it. The drive has a hardware profile I can configure now, it autoruns, and it doesn't stall.

Now the question is... how do I make it E again? It was always E before, so I'd like it to still be E. Having it set to G just seems funny to me. But if I change the settings to E, then it creates two drive letters for the same drive (E and G). I just want E... no G. Any ideas?

 

It should select the next available drive letter after the non-removable drives. It may be a remnant of the effects of TweakUI.

I would still find the latest updates for your chipset/motherboard drivers. That may reset things.

It may have someting to do with the D: drive.

Windows would expect a non-removable drive to be there. If you want to try and get the old HDD going again, do a low-level (zero) format on it using the manufacturer's utilities, this should either get it back to "near-new" or confirm that it no longer works.
I make a "temporary" D: drive on my main HDD. If I want to add another HDD, I remove the D: partition on the main HDD, D: then becomes the primary partition on the second HDD. If there is only one partition on the second HDD, all the drive lettering/designations remain intact. I use Partition Magic to delete the D: partition, not sure if you can use Fdisk (probably could, but there would be less risk with a partition manager).

Matt

 

I appreciate the replies and help from all of you! Thanks so much.

I have made a breakthrough. Apparently, I put MSCDEX in my Autoexec.bat file and forgot about it. For whatever reason though, the drive was set to... you guessed it... "G ". I made that line into a remark because I know I don't really even need it. Now things are back to normal and my CD drive is "E" again! w00t!

I appreciate the help once again! =)