Windows 10: D Drive Suddenly showing up as a CD Drive after working for 4 years as a normal hard drive....

Windows 11 is suddenly seeing my internal 2Tb hard drive as an empty CD Drive. I have tried using different cables and I even checked the drive using an adapter I have to use internal drives externally and it works perfectly fine when not hooked up internally. The Disk does not show up in Disk Management but it does show up in File Explorer as an empty CD Drive. The only thing I haven't tried is rolling back to a previous installation of Windows but this happened today before my most recent update. I thought maybe updating it would help but of course not. I have tried all of these "solutio

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D: drive suddenly mapped to non existent CD ROM drive, cannot change or remove

File Explorer shows a CD ROM drive mounted to the D: drive letter. My computer does not have a CD ROM drive attached. The drive does not show up in Disk Management or in DISKPART "list volume". It does not show up in the registry (that I can find). This
started occurring a couple days ago "out of the blue", I'm assuming a Windows update? When I right click on the drive in File Explorer and select Properties/Drivers, only the drivers for my hard drives show, no driver for the CD ROM drive.

This is causing me headaches because I typically mount a secure image to D: and all my applications are configured to find data on the D: drive. Rather than reconfigure the whole system I need to remove (or assign a different drive letter to) the "ghost"
CD ROM drive.

 

Back up hard drive to CD in D-drive.

I want to back up my Hard Drive to CDs in my D drive, how?

 

CD drive error

1) Close all open programs
2) Click on Start, Run, and type REGEDIT and press Enter
3) Click on the plus signs (+) next to the following folders

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
SYSTEM
CurrentControlSet
Control
Class
{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
4) This folder is the DVD/CD-ROM Drive Class Description in the registry. Look for any of the following names in the right hand column.

UpperFilters
LowerFilters
UpperFilters.bak
LowerFilters.bak
5) If any of the above keys shown in step 4 are listed, right-click on them and choose Delete
6) After deleting the keys, close the Registry Editor
7) Reboot your computer
8) Open My Computer and check to see if your CD or DVD drives have returned. You may also want to open Device Manager and verify that the yellow exclamation and error code on the CD or DVD drive is gone.

And it likely has something to do with the emulated drive you have listed there.