Phantom CD Drive in i9300

My laptop has one combination CD/DVD-RW drive. When reinstalling Windows XP, including reformatting and partitioning the hard drive, I assigned the volume label "R" to the CD/DVD-RW drive in Disk Management. It seemed to work fine, with no problems.

Suddenly, in addition to the "R" drive, I am showing a CD Drive labeled "G."

Here is what I think happened ... I recently got an external USB HD and when I initially plugged it into the laptop it seemed confused and identified it as a CD drive (I had not noticed that there were TWO USB cables to plug in, and once I did that it recognized it as an external HD and works flawlessly.) I believe it was since that time that the mysterious "G" drive showed up. I seem to recall seeing it when I went into Disk Management to format the external HD, and initially just thought it had reassigned my "R" drive as "G."

Any suggestions how to get rid of this? It doesn't seem to be causing any problems, it just bothers me to have a nonexistent drive listed. I already tried deleting it in Disk Management, but, not surprisingly, that didn't work. Any suggestions?

 

I believe I found the answer to my question. I installed Pinnacle, which includes an "Instant CD" feature which apparently can install a "virtual CD" drive. I'm not entirely clear on why or what that does, I'm pretty sure that's what has happened here.

 

Nayeli,

If you download .ISO files you can mount it to the virtual drive and it will act like a CD...comes in handy for MPEG-3 movies and stuff like that. Bootleggers also use that to pirate games and the sort, but I don't recommend stuff like that.

 

Can you tell me how I would do that exactly? The legal stuff, I mean? For instance, could I put a DVD movie in my CD/DVD-RW drive, copy (or rip) all the files on the DVD to the virtual drive (as if it was an actual drive), and then play it from there rather than in the actual drive? What, exactly would be the benefit of that? And since there is no REAL drive G:/ where would all those files actually land? Finally, what would be the advantage of copying it to the virtual CD drive rather than to a separate partition of my hard drive? Hope these questions make sense---this is truly a new concept to me.

Thanks.

 

Well Nayeli, I don't know anything about Pinnacle, but I use Alcohol 120%. Yes, you can make what is called an "image" of a DVD, or any other CD, game, ect you would like. You can then run them in the virtual drive without the CD or DVD. You can put the image in whatever folder you would like. The only real advantage I see, is not needing the actual media. And, I mean, IF I were to ever do something as crazy as pirate games and such, a virtual drive makes that really easy. Not that I would do that though, that is wrong :/

Hope that gives you some idea of how it works. For the most part, I don't think a virtual drive would be very useful for the average person.