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Win7 has decided my external USB HDD is a CD drive - how to fix?
On Windows 7 Home Premium, I have three external HDD drives as well as the standard internal HDD, where the OS itself is installed.
One of the externals is a WD MyBook, which reserves a partition as a system recovery disk for the MyBook. I never access that system recovery partition, which is assigned drive letter F:, and it's been fine for months.
Now, suddenly Windows has decided it's a CD drive. When I boot the PC, an autoplay dialog comes up for this F: drive, asking to scan for and launch media files. In software like Power DVD, this F: drive is showing up as a removeable media source for files for Power DVD to play, and there seems to be some general conflict going on that I haven't quite pinned down yet -- for instance, if I'm playing a Blu-ray from my actual optical disk drive, and doing things with files on the G: drive, which is the actual data partition of this WD external HDD, sometimes the Blu-ray disc is suddenly and spontaneously ejected from the Blu-ray drive and the faux-CD drive tries to take over Power DVD and find files for it to play.
I'm certain I don't have a virus or other malware. I've been through the system with my virus buster (Avira), with Malwarebytes, and with heavy-duty malware and rootkit detectors like Hitman Pro and TDSSKiller, and found nothing.
I tried removing the two partitions of the WD drive completely from my Device Manager, rebooting the PC and letting them reinstall, but Windows just put the F: drive back as a CD drive.
This is driving me kinda nuts. How do I fix it, please?