2 drives showing? Only one physically there?

Anyone know why i see 2 drive icons in my computers when i only have one drive? This is a fresh install, and the drive was formated and eisa partition removed. Odd thing is that in diskmgmt.msc the other drive does not appear? Computer is Dell D630 running Vista. Could it be that when i installed the OS anew, i had the turbo cache in bios enabled so that the OS thinks there is another drive? Or could it also be that i installed with the Intel Matrix Storage drivers and i am not running RAID? Or is this drive something else? I don't have a card reader but i do have smart card reader, but disabling that doesn't remove the icon either?

Thanks =)

 

I dont know exactly what your problem is but a way you kind find out is you could take take the size of your hard drive and multiply it by 10%, then add the size of the 2 drives showing and see if they add up to that. just a thought.

 

Problem is i have one physical drive with no partitions and two drives show up in my computer. When i click on the second drive labelled 'd' it says it is not formatted and is 0 bytes in size. Any attempts at manipulation of this 'd' drive is not permitted, but it appears to be functioning fine according to windows?

 

Its called a partition. You can delete it if it contains 0 size.

 

how to delete it? doesn't show up in diskmgmt.

thanks =)

 

Optical drive?

 

no unfortunately it is not an optical drive...i am starting to wonder if it has something to do with the Intel Matrix Storage drivers...i am new to them but i suspect maybe they need to make a dummy drive for systems that only have a single hard drive? Anyone else who's installed this driver care to chime in? Thanks this is driving me nuts.

 

Nope - Intel Storage Manager doesn't work like that. At least not on my machine.

If it's not showing in Disk Management but is in Explorer there's obviously a glitch there somwhere. Try running chkdsk on the drive or maybe try uninstalling and reinstalling the drive from Device Manager (doubleclick the drive under "Disk Drives", Driver tab, Uninstall button, ok out, reboot and let Windows install it again).

 

You could always use diskpart to check the status of things and see if you can remove the drive.

Another possibility is its a "mounted" subdirectory on your current partition or the subst command was used (yes that still does exist) but I do not see them showing as 0 size and needing format.

 

SteveJonesy, that approach didn't work, but thanks for the help.

Sparky 1720, thanks for the advice diskpart fixed the problem. It displayed it as a raw volume containing 0 bytes. Deleted the volume, went back into diskmgmt and suddenly i could see the unallocated space. From there i expanded into the previously unlisted space and now i am happy to say the ghost volume is history. Still curious as to how it got there in the first place. Forgot all about diskpart since i haven't used it for a while now. Thanks again for the help fellas...round of e-beers for y'all. =) cheers!