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Phantom Drive

Trying to help anyone Googling for this…

I noticed an extra CD/DVD ROM listed on my XP system. Device manager listed it as “AVX CD/DVD ROM” but there was no physical drive associated with it. Removing it from the device manager only restored it at startup.

Turns out it is an artifact of an Alcohol 120% install. The software does a lousy job cleaning up after an uninstall.

The cleanup is easy:

  1. In Device Manager->SCSI and RAID controllers, uninstall a device called “A347SCSI SCSI Controller,” the phantom CD/DVD will disappear.
  2. It will return again at startup if you don’t delete the drivers. Delete the files “a347scsi.sys” and “a347bus.sys” from c:\windows\system32\drivers.
  3. Reboot

Hope this helps someone, because it was pissing me off.

If you want virtual drives without paying for Alcohol 120% just download DAEMON Tools. It’s free and a much lighter install.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 4th, 2005 at 7:41 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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5 Responses to “Phantom Drive”

  1. tyler boone Says:
    September 27th, 2005 at 11:30 pm

    THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!!!!

  2. Bigbobv Says:
    December 30th, 2005 at 10:40 am

    I have a somewhat similar problem… I am showing (4) hard drives when I have only (3) connected. There is my (D) drive (which is my normal connected drive) and now I am showing an additional (H) drive. Interestingly enough, the (H) drive has all the files mirrored from my D drive. Weird…!!! The only two programs I can remember installing before noticing this problem was Daemon Tools and Roxio v6. I uninstalled both and the drive was still there.

    Please note…I can see the drives in “My Computer” but cannot see the (H) drive in Drive Manager. I see only the (3) original drives - C,D & E. I reformated the D drive and I was still able to access “all” the files on the (H) drive…Weird…!!!.

    I have a Pent 4 - 3.0 GHZ w/2GB memory - XP Pro w/SP2. How do I get rid of the “Phantom Drive” or do I just ingore it? OR, do I wipe my system and start from scratch? PLEASE HELP!!!

  3. opti Says:
    January 11th, 2006 at 3:32 pm

    Cheers was wondering why it kept popping up after upgrading alcohol :D

  4. Bill Ruddick Says:
    August 17th, 2007 at 9:24 pm

    You Rock… THis has been a real pain… Alcohol is not worth it…. ha!

  5. Andrew Says:
    July 28th, 2008 at 12:04 pm

    Alcohol crashed my system