Hidden Hard Drive @00000100:\

[Flying Bricked]

OK so I have discovered a "?" hard drive (so called offline ) on my PC which starts with the at symbol and is only visible through my photo and picture viewer / editor which displays drives>folders>files.

Got the usual drives including all SD cards and USB sticks along with their names listed down the left hand side but then I noticed at the very bottom of the list of all these was @00000100:\    .

I right clicked >properties and got  message this drive is off line.

This Drive shows up nowhere else; file manager, Drive manager or disc management.

This is usually an air gaped windows 7 PC unless I am trying to get a game working.. Last time I went online was to get a new GPU   up to date. 

Any ideas

[Mr-Protocol]

Fire up regedit and check out Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices

Just don't modify/delete anything in there.

If you do some research on decoding the hex, you can get the drive serial, and even partition location on a disk for a mounted drive letter.

[0phoi5]

00000100 is a disk I/O error code. It's picking up a disk/partition, but can't read it.

I've had similar issues in the past where 1 disk/partition actually shows as 2; one OK and one corrupt/unreadable.

Try unplugging all USB related items first and check if it disappears after one of them is unplugged.

Then, try disconnecting your Hard Drive temporarily (just unplug it internally, but leave in situ) and booting from an external OS. See if the errored disk shows up then. You could even make the external OS a Linux one and use something like GParted to see if there are any unreadable partitions anywhere.

Lastly, if it's not too much of a pain, try backing up your system, formatting your HDD and reinstalling everything. Sounds like a pain, but usually only 1-2 hours work nowadays.