The disk that isn't there.
Some time ago I had a 1TB Intel M1 SSD installed as my boot drive. I took it out but Disk Manager continues to report that it's there even though that same slot is now occupied by a Kingston drive. Programs like Macrium, AOMEI, EaseUS et al, all claim their programs are reading physical disks on bootup and when you Refresh, you're making it read the disks again. This can't be possible if the physical drive is not attached to the system. The curious thing is I can read from the non-existent disk, copy and paste files to it but it isn't there!
My theory is that the system is getting the drive name, type and location from the BIOS. That's passed to Disk Manager and Macrium is reading from Disk Manager not the physical drives. The reason I can read and write to it is because the system believes it's there, so it allows me to alter the File Allocation Table. Am I right?
I'm sure we can all agree that the system can't be reading a disk that isn't attached but it could be getting information it's happy with by some mechanism like the above. The only 'problem' it causes is a bewildering display of drive letters. The missing drive had three partitions so I'm seeing an extra 3 drives.
To test my theory I'm going to remove all references to it in the BIOS but I'm curious to know what you guys think.
Thanks - rev