How do I get rid of a Virtual Drive

My e drive is now a virtual drive & I'm not sure what program did that. m How can I get it unmounted as I think I have family pics on it?:eek Thanks

 

Better give us some more info so we can advise you better. Even if it's a virtual drive you should be able to read and view the files contained on it, such as photos. Depending on how it was created you may not be able to write to the virtual drive, however (though sometimes that's possible also).

What operating system are you running on this computer? Windows? Which version? 98, XP, Vista? Do you have any backup software (such as Acronis True Image) that can mount a backup image as a virtual drive? Are you the only one who uses this computer? If not, you should, if possible, be talking to the other users to see if they can tell you how this virtual drive was created.

Let us know if you already had a real drive (or partition) that was designated with drive letter E: or if drive E: only just appeared? How do you know it's a virtual drive? Even if it's virtual, can you access it's contents? If not, what happens when, for example you open My Computer and double click on the E: drive? Do you see any files and folders then? Who else has used the computer recently and can they supply any helpful info about this virtual drive? Has Acronis True Image been used to create a backup of another hard drive in the system and did someone then perhaps mount the backup as a virtual drive?

And if you're the only user of this computer, think about what software you've used recently and look at those programs to see if they have options to mount a virtual drive that you may have clicked on accidentally or without realizing what you were doing.

 

Windows XP pro SP2 I have a 300 gig drive which I partitioned into smaller logical drives. "E" being one of them that I stored things on ie. jpegs. Burning image files with some programs has turned the drive into a virtual dvd drive. In windows explorer it is shown as "cd drive e" When you do properties of it you getall the options as if it ws really a cd drive. I have tried iso buster & asked it to unmount all virtual drives but that didn't work. I need some other way to make this drive not think it's a cd drive. Make sense? Thanks:seeya

 

I'm not exactly sure what's going on from your description. Again, I think some more detail is in order. Exactly what program(s) did you use to create these "images" that are now seen as virtual DVD drive E:? Did you use some sort of backup software to create bootable backups and select some option that specified the backups be broken into files that would fit on a DVD of a certain capacity? I think Acronis True Image, for example, has an option like that.

When you say "burning image files" do you mean image in the sense of a "drive image" (typically a bootable copy, or a backup that can be used to reconstruct a bootable copy, of a hard drive) or do you mean images in the sense of jpg and bmp and other kinds of picture/image files?

 

Programs that you download in .iso format need to be "mounted" in a virtual drive & then burned.
On my 300G drive I created drives "c" to "t". All are logical drives. I store different things on them from programs, pictures, music, movies etc. Drive "e" was just one of those drives that I store pictures on. At some point when I burned an .iso image it mounted drive "e" & made it into a cd drive. As with my physical LG RW DVD drive I click properties on "e" drive & it gives me the same physical properties as a real cd drive. I don't know what program has done this but I know it can be reversed. I hope this makes sense to you.

 

Have you tried right clicking on the drive letter/volume name in MyComputer to see if there's an option to "Unmount" in the right click menu? If there's not then what about using Start/Programs/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management and seeing if there's an option there to unmount the virtual drive?

What sort of partitioning software are you using to create all those partitions? Depending on what features your partitioning software has, and how comfortable you are using the software, if you can't find any other way to unmount the virtual drive, maybe you can copy the contents of the virtual drive to one of the other partitions and then use your partitioning software to zap the partition, thus destroying the virtual drive in the process. Then recreate a new partition in the empty space left after zapping the old one.

But I suppose your partitioning software may balk at zapping that partition as long as it's mounted as a virtual drive? Does your partitioning software have any options/commands to unmount a virtual drive, by chance? If not, what program did you use that apparently mounted the virtual drive before burning it to CD? That program should be able to unmount it. Look through the manual or help files to get info to help you find and use the unmount command.

I'm not familiar with this requirement for mounting ISO files as virtual drives before burning them. Maybe that works (are you burning bootable CD's? And are they, in fact bootable using this "mount before burning" method?), but I'm not sure it's necessary.

One other thought, though I don't think it's related to your problems... Why do you have so many partitions/logical drives? Though I don't think it's got anything directly to do with your current problem, and while I realize partitioning a hard drive into multiple partitions has a number of benefits, I think you may have overdone it and that the unusually large number of logical drives you've created makes it more likely you're going to have problems now and then (if only because of the number of logical drives whose drive letters will change if you have to zap a partition to solve a problem, as I'm suggesting you try now).