Windows 10: Phantom Local Disk in Windows Explorer

In Windows Explorer, there's an extra local hard disk (E:\) which doesn't appear in Disk Management. It's about 500MB in size and 3/4 full. If I look at the properties, the name of the phantom disk is the same as the real physical disk (C:\). However, I don't know how to get rid of it, or remove the drive letter. I've attached a picture to help explain.

Thank you,
Steve





:)

 

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

 

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

I have spent 3 hours searching various Microsoft sites for "Phantom Drives" and a number of other search terms trying to find out how to remove Local Disk (E - Local Disk (K that have been added since I converted from Windows 7. There was a solution
posted, but even though I had searched for "Windows 10..." the solution used screen shots from Windows 7. When I right click
Local Disk (E and click open in the resulting dialog box, Windows 10 returns error message "E:\ is unavailable..." If I double-click Local Disk (E Windows 10 returns the same error message. I will appreciate
anyone who can give me Windows 10-specific instructions for deleting these "phantom" disks.

UPDATE: THIS WAS CAUSED BY MISBEHAVING SOFTWARE. VENDOR PUSHED OUT AN UPDATE A FEW MINUTES AGO THAT REMOVED THE EXISTING PHANTOM DISKS AND FIXED THE CAUSE.

 

Your screen shot covered what I need to see in Disk Management. Post another screen shot with Disk Management only.

 

Here it is - you got me thinking - and judging by the size of it, it's the one I've highlighted. However, it's not displaying a drive letter in disk management, and it won't let me add/change one either. I'm loathed to delete it as it appears to have some data on it, but it's all hidden/system stuff.

Thank you,
Steve

 

Do you, or did you have another disk attached somewhere; that model # is a Western Digital Drive.

 

• Open Admin Command (Win+X->Command Prompt (Admin)) then type:
• diskpart
  list volume ====> look for the Volume # that has the size of ~ 500MB
  select volume # =====> # found from list above
  remove
  exit

This should remove the drive letter from it.
The problem was solved also in this post:
Solved Hide system partition that shows in explorer but NOT disk management - Windows 10 Forums

 

Cracking reply - thank you - that fixed it!