Windows 10: Phantom Drives on clean install

I've been working on a Win10 clean install for a few weeks and this has been a huge uphill battle. Every day I seem to encounter some very weird issue and it takes me days/weeks to resolve. Tonight I just encountered several phantom drives.
In the following image the drives F, J, K, H, L and I are what I think are phantom drives. When I formatted the drives as part of the drive label I include the actual drive letter, thus you can see that the phantom drives have forced some of my drives to a different drive letter than I originally assigned to it. I started the clean install just before the first of the year and tonight is the first time I've seen this issue. In the image in the bottom right corner is the properties of one of the phantom drives. I'm also attempting to restore the SSD boot drive to an earlier image but so far I cannot. I'm using Acronis True Image 2016, I boot into the recovery, start to drill down and find the .tib image, the keyboard and mouse stop responding and the only recourse is to reboot.
Suggestions would be appreciated.




:)

 

Windows 10 - Disk drive showing as floppy drive

I installed Windows 10 this afternoon & have just found that i have a phantom floppy drive showing in My PC (My Computer) but not my disk drive.

I went to device manager & the disk drive is there with all drivers installed, operating correctly. But there is also a phantom floppy disk drive installed.

I have tried uninstalling both sets of drives & rebooting but no luck.

Any suggestions?

 

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