Realtek HD audio has started installing a virtual USB CD drive on my system after every boot/restart of Windows 7 x64. It shows in Explorer as an assigned drive, but I haven't found any way to use it. While it's not a true problem, it certainly is annoying. I've spent hours on Google trying to find how to stop this new behavior. The Realtek website is useless. Has anyone else seen this or found a way to stop it ?
Are you sure its the Realtek audio? I've worked a lot of audio problems here and on the Dell forums and never heard of that.
However, as a coincidence I have a "Phantom USB Drive" listed. I did some testing and found out its coming from my Primera Brave SE disc printer (and confirmed by Primera support because they have a "bridge" card for an optional CD/DVD burner).
USB Tree program helped me find mine.
USB Device Tree Viewer
Yes, I'm sure that's where it's coming from as it's listed as "Realtek USB CD-ROM USB Device" in Device Manager. I can uninstall it from Device Manager, but it just comes back the next time Windows is started. To confirm that it was installed by a recent Dell/Realtek/Windows upgrade, I uninstalled Realtek HD Audio and rebooted. The phantom drive went away and didn't return after several Windows restarts, but I also lost all sound from my computer. I reinstalled Realtek HD Audio to recover sound and the phantom drive returned. Next, I tried searching the Registry to see if I might find a setting that would allow me to remove the installation of the Phantom drive, but didn't find anything that seemed to be related.
While I did download the latest driver posted in the Sound & Audio forum, I didn't try those directly from Realtek. I'll use your link and report the results.
Trying the latest driver directly from Realtek just uninstalled, then reinstalled the same driver version I already had installed. It didn't solve the phantom CD drive issue.
Download and run the USB Tree Viewer that I linked. May help to shed some light on where the Phantom drive is.
It turned out that the phantom drive was actually coming from the Realtek LAN driver, not the audio driver. I was finally able to get rid of it by using USBDeview to uninstall the instance that showed as a Mass Storage Device on the USB port. I've rebooted my PC several times without the phantom drive reappearing.
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