extra disks showing

I have had my new PC for about a month now and am just getting to know Vista, one thing i have found strange is that i have 6 removable disks showing that are not in use and these have been there from when i installed the OS, when i insert a disk of connect another hard drive they show up as separate from these which seem to have no purpose.

is there any way i can remove them or are they part of my OS?

any suggestions please

 

well, besides the "o" drive, do you have a media card reader (reads camera cards, ie - sd, cf, etc) installed on your comp? or do you have external h/d's hooked up to your comp? that's all i can really think of right now. - sos

 

The removable disks are USB card readers. Can't be removed. Unless you eject the device. A waste of time IMO. Next time you plug it in the pc, they'll come back. The last one is your optical drive or virtual drive created by some compression/burning tools like Nero.

 

My PC has a built in media card reader for 4 sorts of card so it's maybe that?
As you can see if i hook up an external HD it shows up as a separate drive
thanks for the input
i just found it a bit strange that 4 unused disks were showing

 

Unless you came from a mac background where the disk isn't visible until it's ready for use, it's been like that for years.

Also, you can divide a harddisk into multiple partitions that will look like drives in Windows. They're from the same harddisk.

 

Card readers are very similar to usb flash drives only they cannot be unplugged like the latter. You will end up with one drive for each type of card it can read (Compact Flash[CF] > MultiMedia Card [MMC] > Secure Digital [SD] > Memory Stick) each of the four types will require their own volume letter. Unless you disconnect the reader you can't easily get rid of the drives.