A perplexing question about virtual drives. For some time now I've had a virtual drive on my XP system that I've paid little attention to. I don't recall ever using it.

A couple days ago I removed it, uninstalled from Device manager. I have two dvd/cd drives which were set at D and F with the virtual drive in space E. Once removed my two drives became D & E which makes perfect sense.

The problem is upon reboot the virtual drive reinserts itself again occupying slot E between my two physical drives.

The questions are, where is this thing coming from? It clearly reinstalls on start up but why? Do I need it? I can't imagine why. How do I get rid of it?

It even reinstalled with a clean boot where no programs loaded and only essential microsoft services opened. That begs another question, are 33 essential services required?

Any ideas on how to identify this faux drive and where it is coming from?

What program did you use to create the Virtual Drive? You might have to reinstall it, remove its drive letter through the program itself, and then uninstall it.

Good question Jenny. The problem is I have no idea. I did not intentionally install a virtual drive. My guess would be Game Jackal. Do you know if that program installs a virtual drive. If it is not running or listed on start up how could it reinstall on reboot? wouldn't a file have to load during startup to create that action? Or is a program that is presently installed able to do that even if it does not load on start up?

It is not so much the fact the drive keeps reappearing after I uninstall it as it is my not knowing what program is causing it. I can always disable it as it does not "enable" when rebooting. I am one of those control freaks who can tell you at any time when something new appears in the Window Explorer trees. I like knowing the what and why of junk on my system. I keep the thing clean, never had a virus in twenty years and rarely if ever does spyware climb aboard.

It even reinstalls after an uninstall and reboot in safe mode. What triggers this thing to reinstall?

Yet another edit------
It is not Game Jackal. I dug it out and installed it and the read me clearly says the program does not require a virtual drive. The program set up and options have no tools to create or remove a virtual drive. I am totally stumped, especially since the doggone virtual drive reinstalled while booting up in safe mode.

It isn't that it reinstalls. It's that it left something behind when you uninstalled it without telling it to get rid of the drive letter first.

I don't know anything about Game Jackal or whether it creates a Virtual drive. I know if you install a Virtual CD program, it will create a Virtual CD drive which will take up a drive letter -- and if you uninstall the Virtual CD program without first setting the number of virtual CD drives to 0, the drive letter assignment will remain even though the Virtual CD program is gone.


Did you try any CD emulation programs like Virtual CD, Alcohol, Phantom CD, or Daemon-Tools? I think Nero also has the option for mounting a virtual CD drive.


Since your disabling it is only temporary, you obviously aren't getting at the root of it.

Jenny
Thank you, your advice was spot on. I finally found the culprit, Intervideo editing program made by Corel. I had to disable the virtual drive first then uninstall the Intervideo Scsi controller from the SCSI and Raid Controllers listing in device manager first then uninstall the virtual drive. That cleaned it out solving the issue.

I tried that program awhile back when I was looking for a video editor. I like to take bits and pieces of home video adding sound effects, titles and the like. My Canon digital camcorder has a built in hard drive so I can dump the recording directly to the PC and edit away. Intervideo could not work with the new file format created by Canon. Before the trial period expired I dumped it and bought a program that could handle mt2s files.

Once removing the controller the drive did not appear after reboot and my two physical drives changed to D&E as they were before all this.

"Did you try any CD emulation programs like Virtual CD, Alcohol, Phantom CD, or Daemon-Tools? I think Nero also has the option for mounting a virtual CD drive."

That comment got me thinking that just possibly a video editor may do the same thing. The drive, named IVID SCSI Virtual Drive suggested Intervideo and I tracked it down via their web site.

Game Jackal is like Alcohol/Daemon as it builds a profile of your game and you can play without the cd in the drive. Surprisingly it does not create a virtual drive. Thanks for your help your suggestions pointed me in the right direction.

I'm glad to hear you found the culprit and were able to fix the problem.

Oldmariner

There is a place in "computing" for virtual drives. If, for instance, you downloaded an ISO file, you would simply run the ISO in your virtual drive and install rather than burn the ISO to CD/DVD then install from that CD/DVD.

Daemon-Tools is a very popular download especially the Lite version which is free - the other virtual drive programs Jenny100 mentioned are also note-worthy.

Just a mention.