Bizarre disk drive showing up

On my alienware m17 r3 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 a USB 3.0 hard drive that I Plug in now and then but I don't think it is the culprit as it picks up and is assigned it's own drive letter just fine. Besides I haven't plugged it 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 not due to ms office 2010 which I have because I know that sometimes creates a virtual Q drive according to various threads. The blue question Mark doesn't come up on that issue either.

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

 

Recovery/Respawn partition? Mine does it occasionally too.

 

So you get a 'Y' drive with question mark show up the same?

 

I guess its kind of normal that whenever an external drive is connected / disconnected, the drive letter will change... I have seen it happen when I plug in two external drives at the same time..

For example, when I plug in my external hard drive (I've set the drive letter as E:.) and then plug in the USB pen drive, the USB pen drive automatically gets the drive letter assigned as F:.

But, when I plug in the USB Pen drive first and then the external hard drive, the USB gets the drive letter E: and the external hard drive F:.

I don't know if this in any way answer' your query but most probably you connected / disconnected one or more external drives and the drive letter' got changed... and now the drive letter is there but no external hard drive plugged in (hence the question mark).

One thing you can try is to plug in the external drive (which gets assigned its own drive letter fine, as you mentioned) and then at the same time, try plugging in another external drive or a pen drive or similar and see what happens.

Cheers

 

I have. But only once or twice. When mine showed up it was the AW recovery partition.