Windows Vista CD drive has become a hard drive

Hello everyone - hope you're having a good day,

I am attempting to help a friend of mine but I have little experience with Vista and frankly, no idea how he's messed things up this bad.

Some how his CD Drive has become a Hard Drive (or so Vista thinks) and it now tells him it's filled with "recovery materials" and should not be deleted... now he cannot use his CD Rom because when he puts a disc in, there's no way to access it contents. Additionally, there's several other drives that vista seems to think is there but they really aren't. He's assured me he only has one cd drive. He also says his cd drive was mounted to D when he got the PC.

I had him check the E DVD-RW listed when he inserts a disc but it tells him "There's no disc in E ". I'm entirely unaware if a DVD-RW was ever attached to the PC or if the drive that's broken is a DVD-RW or a CD-RW, he doesn't know and Windows doesn't either apparently. He claims he never touched the drives in anyway. You can see a screenshot of the mess here: http://img197.imageshack.us/img197/6756/drivescreen.jpg

I'm not sure what to do about D now being a recovery drive or how to get functionality of the cd drive back or even what to do with the alphabet of drives he has accumulated. K is really confusing, I think Windows just said "Stop adding drives!!" with that one (he said he never renamed it). He say he *may* have flash or usb drives (forgive him, he's entirely clueless) so maybe that's where all those removable disks came from. They aren't attached anymore though as far as hes aware.

Any advice is appreciated.

 

I'm guessing here (and no experience of Vista) but something to think about whilst waiting for others ideas...

Drive D appears to be a recovery partition, why it's visible I don't know but is there a chance your friend renamed it to CD RW Drive?

The other removables could be explained by a memory card reader etc...

When fully loaded my laptop shows 7 removable drives (4 card reader/2 cell devices with micro SD and a DVD RW) so having 6 isn't unusual.

What does disk manager show?

 

I must agree with Wildfire that the partition as been renamed, but without seeing the contents, it's anyone's guess as to what it is.

I had some trouble with the built in card reader in my box so I took it out: problems solved. I think that's a flaw of Vista to show removable drives with no cards inserted. If your friend doesn't own any memory cards, he could simply unplug the reader and get rid of those pesky empty drives (make a sketch of the placement of the MoBo connectors [leave it in the box] in case he may want to use it again in the future).

You can verify the drives in the BIOS setting's list of devices. If there are no physical optical drive connected in the box, it could be a virtual drive, created by software like Power Iso or Alcohol, without an image mounted.

 

Hello, In reading through what has been previously mentioned it strikes me that I too had a similar scenario where my DVD RW drive had become a virtual drive and yes I could not use the drive for the purpose it was intended, in fact it had become a sleeping drive that I couldn't use and yes there it was on the '' my computer'' window as a separate drive, I could only conclude that I had through the use of burning software caused this drive to become Virtual and of no functional use.

 

Wildfire, I'm like you, not familiar with Vista but my Removable Drives don't show up in XP until I plug them in. I have 2 x 4Gig Pen Drives and they are recognized by brand and type and allocated H & G when plugged in. When removed, they are not shown in Device Manager or My Computer.

If they are not plugged in, why is Vista showing them? Neil.

 

Hi Neil,

I was talking about removable drives connected to the system ( "when fully loaded "), my memory card reader has 4 different slots for various types of memory. When connected it shows 4 drives in my computer even if I'm only using one card.

 

I still feel it's kind of a flaw that card readers, unlike floppy or optical drives, are not identified for what they are, instead of a generic [removable disk], such as: MMC/ SD or SmartMedia/xD or CompactFlash, etc. or simply unlisted until media is inserted. Also it was not obvious which of the 4 [removable disks] had my SD card in it...

I just noticed that for some strange reason my printer (Epson Stylus) shows up a "removable disk" [in My Computer] when turned on...

 

JCinvan: If your printer has a card reader when the printer is turned on that drive will show up as removable disk. Mine has a DVD RW Light Scribe that shows as G:\ DVD RW Drive. I also have a seperate Card reader that shows H:\, I:\, J:\, K:\, L:\ all as Removable Disks.

 

I think I'll stick with XP as I haven't noticed any "extras" in Device Manager or My Computer when all USB drives are plugged in. Good luck in sorting this one out. Neil.

 

Hello everyone,

Just an update - I'm working on getting a screenshot of disk manager from him. Will report back when I get that. I know he doesn't have as many usb devices as being listed there so Vista isn't unmounting them when they are unplugged and continues to cycle through drive letters, not sure that's how it's suppose to be... Is there a safe way to drop those? And would you recommend he use device manager to uninstall that DVD drive listed there then reboot and hope it picks the real drive up?