phantom disc drive appeared and can't find, re-assign or remove it

[taut]

hi, i also posted this in another section, but thought it may be in the wrong place??

anyway - i just unplugged everything from my system, to install a new graphics card, and at the same time dust around it, tidy up etc. including an external hard disc which is connected full time, and is assigned, or was assigned drive F.
as i had an onboard card originally, i had difficulty with the install, so had to reset the bios by removing the battery.

everything works fine now, except i have a phantom cd drive in F
it doesn't show in the device manager, and it isn't in disc management either.
the biggest poblem is i have an external drive which has 500gig of projects, photos and video, which are all linked to adobe lightroom, premiere and after effects, and now they are all broken links, unless i can assign the drive which has now been assigned to E, back to F where it should be.

help!!!

 

[marsmimar]

Hello taut and welcome to Seven Forums.

You might be able to use system restore to roll back your computer to a date/time prior to having the phantom drive show up. If you've updated any drivers or added any programs after the date of the selected restore point, they will be uninstalled. For this reason I would manually create a new (current) restore point so you can undo the system restore.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/700-system-restore.html

System Restore - Undo - Vista Forums

A second option might be to use this free utility called GhostBuster. It may be able to detect the phantom drive and uninstall it outright. If it works it should free up drive letter F so you can reassign it to the external hard drive. Again I would recommend a new restore point just in case.

GhostBuster - Home