Local disk appearing in Win explorer.

[BowdonUK]

Im wondering if you guys can shed some light on this.

I have noticed a drive Z appeared in my windows explorer window. I have 2 drives normally. An ssd and an hdd. If I drive to click this Z drive it doesnt let me access it.

At first I thought maybe it was the computer reading a usb device I'd plugged in.. but today I havent plugged anything in and just noticed it there.

I think this might have started happening since one of the smaller windows updates.

It's not a big issue. Just wondering why its happening.

[Double clutch]

Can you provide a screen shot?
And is it showing up in Disk management
Did you just get updates?
If it shows up in disk management, notice the size of the drive. There might be a partition about the same size listed in disk management and that is why I say it is a recover partition. Why it showed up all of the sudden I would say something to do with an update. I suggest waiting for another update to see if it goes away. You probable can't open or hide it, you don't want to delete it. Hope this helps.

[BowdonUK]

Thanks for the reply mate.

Ok I've attached a screenshot of windows explorer. The C drive is my SSD. The Local disk D drive is my big storage hdd drive, and the mystery local disk Z is this odd drive.

I have noticed 2 things. The Z drive is FAT32, while the others are NTFS. Also when I go to settings, then storage, only drives C and D appear. This Z drive doesn't appear.

It had appeared and disappeared when I've noticed it in the past. That's why I thought it was registering a usb device as a local disk. But then on a re-boot it would disappear. Now for some reason its remaining on the system after a reboot. Kinda odd.

I've done virus checks and nothing as come up.

Ok I just checked in disk management and it has 4 things listed in the top window. 2 of them dont have a drive letter.. so it lists them as

Quote:Volume Layout Type File System Status                                                                    Capacity
         Simple  Basic                 Healthy (Recovery Partition)                                       450MB
         Simple  Basic                 Healthy (EFI System Partition)                                    99MB
C        Simple  Basic NTFS         Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)  232.33 GB
D        Simple  Basic NTFS         Healthy (Primary Partition)                                         2794.52 GB

So the this local disk Z seems to be the 99MB entry. Not sure why its appearing though in the list. I'll try and add another image of the disk management in the next post. Hoping the attachment attaches ok on this one

---

Ok I'm attaching the disk management screen picture too.

---

I'm wondering if this is something to do with me updating the network printer drivers.

I just searched local disk appearing with google and some HP forum pages appeared with other people having the same local disk showing up.

I'm not sure why this should local disk should be appearing after installing the updated drivers for the printer. One guy here: https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Hardware-and-Upgrade-Questions/What-the-Local-Disk-Z/td-p/5562838 said;

Quote:When I scan the drive What I find is Z:\EFI\Microsoft\ and Z:\EFI\HP\ folders with I think are boot\system files. one of the file I was able to catch was: Z:\EFI\HP\SystemDiags\SystemDiags.s12.

I notice that drive Z:  Around the time I was trying to install a new HP Envy 5540 printer.

Seems very odd why this would happen. But yea I did update the drivers as my old printer broke so I bought the same model and had to tell hp to find it.

[Double clutch]

YEAH I would say ignore it. I would say a recovery partition.

[Britec]

It could be a virtual driver of some sort for a printer (example uniprint creates a virtual drive)

If it is a uniprint virtual drive, you can disable it by creating this registry key 

Code:

HKey_Local_Machine\SOFTWARE\UniPrint\Client

navigate to location and create a new DWORD 32bit and name it "DisableVirtualDrive" and set the value to "1"

[Compton]

I was working on a 8.1 system recently just after installing updates windows it would appear after the system was restarted it disappear I am guessing it have something with windows updates

Microsoft stop playing houdini lol

[WinXPto10]

you're correct Compton, it's same thing on my windows 8.1 too

---

BowdonUK, does your computer turned off while installing updates?

[RichTech]

It has nevered happened to me, and I am running windows 8.1

[Compton]

from what i see its only happening on hp computers

[RichTech]

(09-17-2016, 01:45 PM)Compton Wrote:  from what i see its only happening on hp computers

Okay, however, I have an HP Laptop running 8.1 and it hasn't appeared.