DVD drive replacement problem

[wziip]

Hello guys, I have a problem that I need help fixing. It's a very simple issue that has occurred when I was replacing my DVD drive and it should have a simple solution... which I sadly don't know.

Well a couple of months ago my DVD drive stopped working so I decided to buy a new one. The old one was connected by an ATA cable (it was really old) and was shown under the E letter in My Computer. The new one however used a SATA cable and I needed to connect it to a different port.

Now the problem is that I was stupid enough to not uninstall the old drive in the device manager before I went with replacing it. The new one works fine but it is under a different letter and the computer is still thinking that there's something under the E letter and wont let me remove it or put something else under it.

So is there a way to remove the annoying "drive ghost" from E and replacing it with the new one without me actually having to open the case again and connecting the old drive?

 

[phil22]

There is no requirement to "uninstall" a CD/DVD drive in Device Manager before you physically replace it with a new one, just as there is no requirement to "uninstall" a hard drive in Device Manager when replacing one of those.

Make absolutely sure that there is not some other storage device plugged in (a pen drive, perhaps, or a card reader) which has been assigned the letter E:

 

[popatim]

Perhaps your bios is not set to autodetect on the ide port. Boot into the bios and set it to auto or not installed for that port and then save and reboot. You should be good to go then.