XP Phantom CD drive

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I recently wiped my harddrive and now have everything back almost where I want it, but I have acquired a phantom CD drive. The regular CD drive is D, I had a flash drive plugged in during install and that went to E, then this CD drive on F. I have 3 other partitions, G, H and I and I just plugged in an external CD drive last night that went to K. I would really like to get rid of the phantom drive and get all the letters sorted. I use Partition Magic, (old but good partitioning software), to do the partitions. I used to be able to use that to re-letter the drives but not this time. I don’t leave the flash drive on so don’t know why it stays in the chain. I have XP SP3 on a Toshiba laptop Satellite A105.

Any ideas appreciated.:confused:

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I was just looking through the properties of each and it appears that my Magic Jack VOIP application has decided it was a CD drive. I have had Magic Jack for over a year and has never shown up that way before, at least I don’t think so. Anyone familiar with Magic Jack?

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One thing I found that’s helpful, as I also dual boot Ubuntu, which uses a different naming of drives and partitions, is to give each drive and partition a name.
They then are always easy to identify, whether in Win or Ub.

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I have found it is always better to reinstall an OS with all other ext drives, etc, disconnected. I’m wondering if you were to look in the Disk Manager to see if the phantom HD could be removed there. I do not know anything about Magic Jack, but if this was an ext device plugged in during the reinstall, I can see where it might be assigned a drive of it’s own. most likely when you originally installed Magic Jack, your OS was already in place so Windows did not assign it a drive letter.

If this was a recent change, it might be easier to correct with another complete reinstallation with ALL ext devices disconnected during the install. This would include Magic Jack, all flash drives, all ext HD, everything.

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It’s one of those mysterious things that Windows XP sometimes does, just to confuse you. “Gotcha!”

At one time, with XP, I had a phantom M: drive. I think it did look like a CD drive.
I don’t remember now, how I ever got rid of it.
But as the old farmer used to say “leave it alone, it don’t eat no hay”.

Happy Holidays!

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I was able to go in and re-letter the drives and put the Magic Jack CD designation on J and that seems to work OK.

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