Several drives have been established which are not now needed and have
no data, but apparently can't be deleted. When right clicked in the
Explorer, there is no option to shred available. Hpw can I delete
these useless drives ? !

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On Wed, 29 Sep 2021 17:51:19 -0400, <[email protected]> wrote:

Several drives have been established which are not now needed and have
no data, but apparently can't be deleted. When right clicked in the
Explorer, there is no option to shred available. Hpw can I delete
these useless drives ? !

Windows assigns the drive letters when it finds the partitions at startup. It's been a long time since I ran windows. Running as administrator, in the menu there
is there is an option for "Disk Manager" or some similar name, that can be used to delete the partition. Be aware, that if these are not currently the last drive letters, assigned, any drives after them in the alphabet will have their letters changed. So what was drive F: for example may become E:. That change may
not occur until reboot. I don't remember for sure, but think that's how it worked.

Regards, Dave Hodgins

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--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On 9/29/2021 5:51 PM, [email protected] wrote:

Several drives have been established which are not now needed and have
no data, but apparently can't be deleted. When right clicked in the
Explorer, there is no option to shred available. Hpw can I delete
these useless drives ? !

Be careful with these urges to destroy things, OK ?

If the "useless drives" were around 500MB to 1GB in size,
some of those are partition 0x27 (Hidden NTFS) and those
may contain things like the WinRE.wim for reagentc.
There's not even a notation in Disk Management for that one,
no warning about deleting those.

If the partitions in question were "created by you", then
those are safer to delete.

You're picked the *dangerous* ones to delete :-)

Windows Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc) has notations "boot" and
"system". On a GPT disk the word "system" appears in "EFI system partition" label. That's a small partition, normally towards the front of
the disk drive. The C: partition has the word "boot" in it, and
Microsoft uses reverse-think on these, as "boot" means
"this is the system partition". Boot and system are the exact
opposite of their function.

"system label" equals the thing starting the boot process

"boot label" equals the C: partition aka the system as we know it

https://i.postimg.cc/YSPxYrXn/smaller-partitions-dont-delete.gif

Paul

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These are not partitions of other drives but are seen as seperate
external entities like the CD drive. If I try to add some data, it
requests that I insert a disc etc. There are no physical drives !

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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See : https://postimg.cc/JtH8vCVR

There are no physical drives H, I, J and K .

If I select K and "Eject", I get the message that it is safe to remove
K from the computer.

But there is no physical K drive to remove !

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On Thu, 30 Sep 2021 14:42:00 -0400, <[email protected]> wrote:

See : https://postimg.cc/JtH8vCVR
There are no physical drives H, I, J and K .
If I select K and "Eject", I get the message that it is safe to remove
K from the computer.
But there is no physical K drive to remove !

Then they are either empty flash card reader slots, or online "drives" like the one shown for McAfee Vaults. For the card reader slots, the card reader would have
to be disabled in the bios/uefi setup, to remove them. For the online "drives", simply uninstalling the software and rebooting would remove them.

Regards, Dave Hodgins

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Change [email protected] to [email protected] for
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--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On 9/30/2021 3:11 PM, David W. Hodgins wrote:

On Thu, 30 Sep 2021 14:42:00 -0400, <[email protected]> wrote:

See : https://postimg.cc/JtH8vCVR
There are no physical drives H, I, J and K .
If I select K and "Eject", I get the message that it is safe to remove
K from the computer.
But there is no physical K drive to remove !

Then they are either empty flash card reader slots, or online "drives" like the
one shown for McAfee Vaults. For the card reader slots, the card reader would have
to be disabled in the bios/uefi setup, to remove them. For the online "drives",
simply uninstalling the software and rebooting would remove them.

Regards, Dave Hodgins

On removable media drives, you can hide or show an icon,
for when that drive is empty. As you suggest David, the
four items H,I,J,K is a common pattern of 4-in-1 card readers
that come with OEM computers.

"Hide or Show Empty Drives"

https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/6969-drives-hide-show-empty-drives-computer-folder.html

The Hide or Show should work with Optical drives, 4-in-1 card readers,
and the SD slot on my laptop.

And the Mcafee Vaults, is present even if the feature
is turned off.

Paul

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On 9/30/2021 8:13 PM, Paul wrote:
snip...

On removable media drives, you can hide or show an icon,
for when that drive is empty. As you suggest David, the
four items H,I,J,K is a common pattern of 4-in-1 card readers
that come with OEM computers.

"Hide or Show Empty Drives"

https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/6969-drives-hide-show-empty-drives-computer-folder.html

The Hide or Show should work with Optical drives, 4-in-1 card readers,
and the SD slot on my laptop.

And the Mcafee Vaults, is present even if the feature
is turned off.

   Paul

There is a major downside to that or so it seems to me. For the "hide empty drives" to work you also have to agree to "don't show hidden files,
folders, or drives". I never enable the hiding but maybe that is just me.
Oh, this was tested on the latest W10 version. YMMV

--
Bodger's Dictum: Artifical intelligence
can never overcome natural stupidity.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On 30/09/2021 19:42, [email protected] wrote:

See : https://postimg.cc/JtH8vCVR

There are no physical drives H, I, J and K .

If I select K and "Eject", I get the message that it is safe to remove
K from the computer.

But there is no physical K drive to remove !

This sounds like the well known phantom drive problem.
Open a Command Prompt (Admin) and one of these should work:
subst x: /d
OR
net use x: /delete
where X: is the drive letter of the phantom drive to remove.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On 9/29/21 4:51 PM, [email protected] wrote:

Several drives have been established which are not now needed and have
no data, but apparently can't be deleted. When right clicked in the
Explorer, there is no option to shred available. Hpw can I delete
these useless drives ? !

Disk Management will not allow you to delete partitions necessary for
your operating system.
That is the good news.

That said, if you have a 2nd drive that you've temporarily attached to
your machine and want to use disk management to delete it, Windows will
not allow you to delete the boot partition.

To do so, you need to use "diskpart" or else do so from Linux

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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