Solved Mysterious new 'Local Disk (F)' appears after reinstall

Hey All,

Today I factory reinstalled Win 8 from the hard disk image on my Toshiba P870. I then installed Win 8.1 from a CD and installed all updates.

I've done this a few times no worries but a mysterious new drive has appeared that I do not have permission to access (despite my local account being administrator). Here's its properties and the pop-up I get when I try to access it. It seems to be some sort of optical drive(r) but there's no external media inserted at all.

Could anyone explain what this is and how I get rid of it? The cooling fan also seems to be working overtime since it appeared too.

MBAM and Defender both scanned it as clean so this is a mystery to me...

Any help would be much appreciated. Many thanks!
NL

Welcome to the forum. Can you post a screenshot from disk management so we can see on no account mess with it as it sounds like the boot partition which shouldn't have a drive letter, mess with it and you won't be able to boot

Hey Samurai,

Thanks for the response!

After posting last night I recalled leaving the 8.1 install CD in the optical drive after installing and while 8.1 updates ran. I hypothesized that the mysterious F: drive might have been spat out by leaving in the CD and the system trying and failing to run it again. So, while it was fresh I rinsed and repeated: re-install 8 from disk image and install 8.1 from CD.

And lucky me, it worked No more mysterious F drive.

Hopefully that's the last of it.

Thanks again,
NL

Good to know that. We are now better prepared to deal with similar problems that may be reported. Thanks for sharing that info. The lesson: After installing Windows from the CD/DVD media, remember to remove the CD/DVD and pack it back safely.