Windows 10: A phantom removable drive is showing up in disk management

There is no drive assigned. I wonder what it refers to? I've checked the registry but can't figure it out. How would I remove it?




:)

 

Windows 10 is assigning Local Disks that don't exist. I now have E-K & want to remove them

You could launch the Disk Manager and remove the drive letters of the phantom drives. They will then no longer show up in Windows Explorer.

 

non existing phantom drives listed as Unknown devices in Device Manager

Original title: Phantom drive in Windows 10

OS Windows 10. My computer showed two phantom drives. I tried to eject them through the “Safely remove hardware and eject media” but I never get a list of those drives to remove.

I also tried through the Device Manager> View> Show Hidden Devices> but those phantom drives do not show in the listing, so I can’t uninstall them. It did show a “WPD FileSystem Volume Driver” with a yellow triangle and I clicked to uninstall. Then
I moved to Disk drives in the same Device manager and it listed one non-existing drive. I clicked on uninstall and after a little time it instructed me to restart the computer which I did by clicking the “restart now’. The computer went to restart and just
hanged in there, allowed it to work the restart for a couple of hours so I finally did a hard reboot.

When it finally came on, I clicked on the Windows Explorer> This PC. This time it showed only one phantom drive as “Local Disk H:”

Opened again Device Manage> View> Show hidden devices> under disks it only showed the correct disks installed on the PC. Under portable devices showed: Unknown device, so I did uninstall it. Closed the Device manager. No restart request this time.

On Windows explorer it still shows the phantom drive as “Local Disk H:”

Next I went to Disk Management. The window for it came up but although it says “Connecting to Virtual Disk Service,” it never shows anything in spite of letting it work for a couple of hours. I believe the PC gets confused searching for that non-existing
phantom drive. Also checked under Computer management> Services> Virtual Disk: and it said it was running. Still nothing shows in Disk Management.

The Phantom disk I believe is interfering with the search feature in Windows Explorer since every time I try to find a document it takes too long.

On my frustration downloaded from Microsoft the “Windows installation tool” for my Windows 10 and tried that to see if a repair would get me clear of that non-existing drive. However after doing that repair it still did list the non-existing drive.
So I tried again with that DVD and did a reinstall of Windows 10. No luck the phantom drive is still there; if I click on it the computer tries to find it and just hangs in there and nothing can be done on it just freezes.

Any help and suggestions will be greatly appreciated

 

Ah, forgot I had a card reader. I assigned it a letter, and inserted media, and it's OK now.