Non-existent CD drive cannot be removed

[Phantom1983]

In my device manager I have a CD drive listed that does not physically exist and I don't know where it has come from. At first I thought it was a mounting drive for Daemon tools, but I've checked and it isn't. When I try to uninstall this drive it just comes back again when I restart windows. Also, for some reason it's listed as a SCSI device on my non-SCSI capable computer.

Not knowing where this drive has come from is worrying me, and the fact that I can't get rid of it even more so. Any ideas?

Cheers,

M.

 

[Smilin]

read last entry in your windows\setupapi.log file.

If something is appearing there it means the hardware is reporting a device to Windows. The log entry may reveal more about what it is.

Keep in mind that IDE/SATA raid controllers may show up under SCSI devices genericly until their full hardware description is discovered via .inf files.

 

[Phantom1983]

Thanks for the tip. I found the following line:

Found "GenCdRom" in C:\WINDOWS\inf\cdrom.inf; Device: "CD-ROM Drive"; Driver: "CD-ROM Drive"; Provider: "Microsoft"; Mfg: "(Standard CD-ROM drives)";

Seems like a device is being conjured out of nowhere. Disabled, the drive doesn't appear in My Computer but, oddly, my SD card reader is drive G: and my pen drive is drive I:. Could the fact that H: is missing be prompting Windows to look for a drive to fill the "gap"? I should point out that one of my Daemon mounting drives was H:

 

[Smilin]

The "found gencdrom" stuff just means the PNP ID of the device "fell through". No specific driver was found so it used a generic CDRom driver. The fact that something was detected is the important part. It means that a device truly is being reported by the hardware to the OS.

No, windows won't try to "fill in" a drive letter. If it detects something that needs a drive letter it will check the mounteddevices key and produce one, but only on demand.

I'm honestly not familiar with the utility you mention so I'm not sure how it works. It could be the culprit I suppose. Triggering pnp detection seems an odd way to install a virtual device though.

 

[Phantom1983]

Daemon tools is a stand-alone application that allows DVD isos (amongst other things) to be mounted on "phantom" drives. Before I got my DVD drives I used to use it to mount DVD's. Now that I have them, I've disabled the virtual drives and just keep Daemon around for occasional mounting of isos.

 

[thegorx]

yes mounting iso files in a lot of case use a virtual drive
nero has such a drives also virtualCD and gamedrive