Bizarre local disk showing up

Hi all,

On my laptop running windows 7 ultimate I have an odd issue. Intermittently a 'y' local disk drive with a blue question Mark shows up under my computer drives under category 'other devices'. Like I say it only shows up every now and then and there is no rhyme or reason behind it. It has a zero capacity and if you click it the location is unavailable. It's not a virus because I have done various scans and nothing malicious has been picked up. I do have an iphone & USB 3.0 hard drive that I Plug in now and then but I don't think these are the culprits as it picks them up fine and is assigns drive letters without issue. Besides I haven't plugged either of these in during last few boots. In that time the mysterious local ' y' drive with accompanying blue question Mark has reared up a couple times. It's also not due to ms office 2010 (i do have this) which has been mentioned on some forums as this creates a virtual Q drive sometimes but has no blue question mark.

As far as I can tell this 'y' drive is doing the computer no harm but it is an irritating thing and I wondered if I can get rid of it at all? Looking under disk management it is never listed under here. It just shows up under 'my computer' with no option to delete or hide it as far as I can see.

Thanks, Wayne

In device manager, unhide hidden devices.

Device Manager : Hidden Devices

Delete all disk drives except the current internal hdd's. Also delete all generic volumes under storage volumes and all greyed out devices under USB controllers. Shutdown computer, boot up. Windows will find and install new hardware.

Any chance you have a printer with a built-in card reader?

Yes I do have a printer with built in card reader. Is this the reason? It's a wifi printer but most of the time I don't even have it turned on.

You should be able to find out easily. If the printer is turned on, the drive will appear, if it is related to the printer.

Thanks so much for the response. Ok, will take a look later when I am back home. I think I had the printer turned on the other day. From what I remember the drive didn't show up when it was on. Although there is a chance the ghost 'Y' drive did materialise on a later boot (printer was now off) so there is a slight chance it may be related but I don't think it is the case. Is there a way to hide the drive so it doesn't show up? Just for aesthetics more then anything. I will also look at Bill2's helpful suggestion at viewing hidden drives in device manager when the 'Y' drive next rears it's head.

Many thanks,
Wayne

Well I haven't been able to check this because the 'Y' drive hasn't reared it's head for about the last 15/20 boots. Hopefully it's gone forever. I have unhidden the devices in anticipation and also download cyber's drivehide program. Unlikely, but one thing that may of fixed it. My memory card reader has always had a dummy plastic card in the slot. This is how it was shipped by Dell. I have always kept in there when not using the slot more for protection against dust etc. Well I removed it and it hasn't happened since. Perhaps this caused the issue. Seems unlikely but you never know. Strange that the 'Y' drive was so intermittent in it's showing up though.

Anyway, thanks to all the suggestions. For completeness I will update this thread if anything changes/happens.

Cheers,
Wayne

Oh well it wasn't that. The Y drive showed up this morning again. First time in about 20 boots. I didn't have time to mess around with the hidden drives though. No doubt it will be gone again for a while when I reboot tonight. It's strange. I wonder if it's something to do with the hidden recovery partition alienware/dell provides? The only thing I did last night was plug into USB 3.0 port to save a system image to the hard drive. You would think on that basis the external hard drive is the culprit but that was last night and 3 susequent boots after removing the drive later in the evening did not yield the mysterious 'Y' drive. It was only this morning it showed up. Very odd behaviour!