Non-Existant DVD Drive will not go away!!!

I recently installed a DVD writer but I forgot to set it to slave before I installed it in my system. I therefore had two drives on the same IDE cable set to master when I started up my system for the first time with the new drive installed.

Upon starting up the system I knew immediately something was wrong and corrected the error by setting the new drive to slave from master.

The system works fine now but ever since there has been a "ghost" dvd drive listed in the device manager and in "My Computer" which will not go away. When I uninstall the device, Windows redetects it upon startup. If I set the imaginary device to "disabled" it does not show up in "My Computer" but I find it causes problems with the stability of the system.

Any ideas where the problem lies and how to rectify it??

Thanks

 

I'm not sure I understand the problem..you have the drive installed but it shows up twice? or it's not installed and is still showing up.?
if the drive is showing up twice then try unhooking it and restarting windows. then after windows see's there is no drive there...reconnect it and start windows again.
also have you checked in your BIOS to see how the drive is listed?

 

Yes, I have the drive installed and it shows up twice. I will try unhooking the drive completely and restarting, and see what that does. Didn't check my BIOS.
Thanks for the advice!

 

A thing I'd try, is this:

Go into device manager, and remove all of your dvd/cdrom drives. Then reboot. See what happens. Windows will redetect your drives.

Then, click start, run, type in CMD (press enter)

Now, do the following:

set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1 (press enter)

devmgmt.msc (press enter)

once device manger appears go to view, show hidden devices, you may/should see a (pending where you are at) greyed out (ghosted) devices. These are devices that use to be installed, but are not installed now, you may remove these. Though, I recommend only removing the device you know you won't be using again.

Hope this helps!