Windows 10 Home 64-bit.
After my last reboot, my PC seems to think it has a CD drive mounted that it does not actually have. There is one physical DVD drive, which shows up, but it is prompting me to load a CD into a CD drive that does not exist.
How do I diagnose and resolve this?
Probably not the easiest way fixing things, but have you tried installing a CD drive?
I like this, it’s funny.
For the OP, my guess is that you have an installer for software. So, did you install anything recently? Depending on the installer and OS, it may appear as a drive or CD-ROM. You can probably right-click and eject.
I’m suspecting one of those USB drives is doing this. one or more of them may have a partition which shows up as a “virtual” CD drive. many times it’s where they put the installer for a bundled backup, clone, or security utility.
Thumb drives and removable hard drives are notorious for this. Less obvious would be some Android telephones or tablets, if you have one of those plugged into your computer’s USB. Some of these present a second “drive” in addition to the writeable storage available to transfer files between the computer and the device, and the “second drive” appears as a CD full of installer software for that phone manufacturer’s special apps for the device.
And now for something completely different: Windows 10 has the ability to natively mount a disk image file (like an .ISO file) as a virtual CD. If you have an .ISO file someplace and you double-click it, Windows creates a fake CD drive with the contents of the disk image. You get rid of this by “ejecting” the fake drive. The ISO file will still be there, but it won’t be active as a virtual disk.
Reboot your computer and, as soon as it reaches the BIOS screen, press “F2” rapidly until you go to the settings screen. Go to the drives section and see what is there. You can enable and disable drives in BIOS. If you can find the culprit there, simply disable it and it will disappear from Windows when you reboot.
I have not added any new removable drives, but I do have a couple of them connected. I have drives with all kinds of recovery partitions, maybe it is one of those. I tried to right-click on the CD drive in Windows Explorer and it hangs. Device Manager shows it as WD Virtual CD 1110 USB device, which seems to point to one of my USB hard drives. I don’t want to destroy any data that might be there but I’ll see if I can virtually remove it without destroying the partition.
Thanks for the insight.
If you go to Control Panel -> Devices and Printers -> Device Manager, how many entries do you see under “DVD/CD-ROM drives”?
Yesterday in Window’s list
There was a drive that did not exist
It did not exist again today
I wish, I wish it would go away
apologies to Hughes Mearns
It’s ok. I just chalk it up to the Hugh Mearns condition.
:applause:
Its been quite a while since hard drives had to be added into bios in that way.
Cdroms never had to be there. In fact you only needed to have the hard drive(s) you were booting there, if the bios let you get away with that.
Given the computer is running Windows 10, I’m sure its not a 100 MHz single core 486sx with the floating point missing and 8 megabytes of RAM … More like 40 times frequency (and cycles per instruction best considered as instructions per cycle…) and 1000 times the RAM.
